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Excess Deaths in 2020

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Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#51

Post by gloryless »

lettergram wrote: post #42

I’m always fairly torn by these numbers (I’ve done a lot of research and tracked this[1]). There’s a lot of confounding factors... The lockdowns increased the rate of suicides substantially. Largely suicides occur in people 65+, so a 100% increase in suicides would be some 150k deaths in the same age range as COVID. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml Murder is also up some 50% and there were rio…

This is nonsense. Suicides are down in 2020. It was a virus that killed people, the deaths were reported. Conspiracy theories are so exhausting

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#52

Post by Jtsummers »

StavrosK wrote: post #34
mensetmanusman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/23/us/covid-19-d... This is close to the analysis of interest. It’s true there are so many confounding issues, e.g. obesity rates have never been higher and are a huge cofactors, population inversion, etc.

Interesting that way fewer people died after the 1918 pandemic. I assume it "weeded out" all the people who were likely to die soon anyway, but what's more interesting is that the negative bar seems to be longer than the positive one, which would somehow mean that the pandemic saved lives? Very odd.

1918 was also during WWI. While they mark that with the pandemic, are they including US service member deaths during the war in death totals? I'm trying to find a breakdown by year, but the total US deaths from the war was around 100k.

Even taking them as evenly distributed over 1914-1918 (inaccurate) that's 20k extra deaths in each of those years.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#53

Post by caddemon »

StavrosK wrote: post #34
mensetmanusman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/23/us/covid-19-d... This is close to the analysis of interest. It’s true there are so many confounding issues, e.g. obesity rates have never been higher and are a huge cofactors, population inversion, etc.

Interesting that way fewer people died after the 1918 pandemic. I assume it "weeded out" all the people who were likely to die soon anyway, but what's more interesting is that the negative bar seems to be longer than the positive one, which would somehow mean that the pandemic saved lives? Very odd.

Assuming it's not just noise, could be that technology developed or cultural norms changed because of the pandemic saved some lives down the line.

Also, weren't deaths in the first year of life much more common back then? Maybe there were just significantly less people having kids right after the pandemic.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#54

Post by insickness »

HideousKojima wrote: post #40

I'm curious if there's a good way to breakdown how much is caused by COVID vs., say, caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides, etc.). For example the US suicide rate declined from 2018 to 2019, but went back up in 2020. Naively assuming that all of the increase was due to the effects of the lockdowns would attribute ~2,880 suicides to them (or more if in a counterfactual world the su…

The health impacts due to social/psychological effects alone of lockdown may be substantial. As an analogue, the annual spike of deaths around the holiday period increases “somewhere between 3% and 9% depending on the demographic group you look at, and between 1% and 10%, depending on the cause of death analyzed.”

https://www.us-funerals.com/deaths-spike-on-christmas-day/

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#55

Post by HideousKojima »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #48
HideousKojima wrote: post #40

I'm curious if there's a good way to breakdown how much is caused by COVID vs., say, caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides, etc.). For example the US suicide rate declined from 2018 to 2019, but went back up in 2020. Naively assuming that all of the increase was due to the effects of the lockdowns would attribute ~2,880 suicides to them (or more if in a counterfactual world the su…

Suicides declined in 2020 [1] Cost benefit analysis is important. But it's pretty clear the vast majority of excess deaths were covid related, because there's a very strong correlation between excess deaths and reported covid cases/deaths, even when you look at different states that had different peaks at different times, and no such correlation to other responses like different types of lockdowns. More delayed / ind…

Weird, the first result when I did a search claimed it went up to 14.8 per 100,000 this year, from 13.9 per 100,000 last year according to the Google summary, but the actual page doesn't seem to actually have that data: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measur...

Looks like the CDC data is still preliminary? So I guess we'll have to wait and see what the actual number is.

EDIT: Looking through the charts on that link it does list a 14.8 for 2020 suicides but doesn't seem to have a source?

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#56

Post by xxxxxxx12 »

FWIW, an economist published this paper recently estimating "the cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282":

> Generally speaking, the ineffectiveness of lockdown stems from voluntary changes in behavior. Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent noncompliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns. The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries. Using a cost/benefit method proposed by Professor Bryan Caplan, and using two extreme assumptions of lockdown effectiveness, the cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282. That is, it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.

http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#57

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

lettergram wrote: post #42

I’m always fairly torn by these numbers (I’ve done a lot of research and tracked this[1]). There’s a lot of confounding factors... The lockdowns increased the rate of suicides substantially. Largely suicides occur in people 65+, so a 100% increase in suicides would be some 150k deaths in the same age range as COVID. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml Murder is also up some 50% and there were rio…

Your suicide statistic link doesn't have any data for the 2020 year. And in my region suicides are down. https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/suicide-deaths-in-alberta-in-2020...

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#58

Post by simonh »

DataDaoDe wrote: post #32

One thing I would like to know, and I don’t know enough about mortality measures so maybe someone who does could chip in, would be essentially what is the probability of observing a year like 2020 with respect to all cause mortality. Is it in 99th-percentile or are we looking at an observation within a standard deviation of the expected value,etc.

Given the range of values over 5 years it seems pretty unlikely for most states, but might not be out of the question for say Hawaii or Vermont say. Unlikely, but not impossible.

One factor to bear in mind is the 5 year period includes a particularly nasty flu season in 2017-18 so the last 5 year period includes a high outlier.

The thing is over the long term all kinds of outlier events pop up, like this one, but it's hard to think of any with this magnitude. 9/11 killed 3k people in one go, but that's only one tenth of the excess deaths in New York from Covid in a single month. Even the 1906 Earthquake that devastated San Francisco only killed less than 1% of the city's population. World War 2 had an appreciable effect of course at 300k deaths over about 3 years.

If we're including other pandemics of course there's the Spanish Flu which also killed about half a million Americans or more, against a population a third the size.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#59

Post by xorfish »

HideousKojima wrote: post #40

I'm curious if there's a good way to breakdown how much is caused by COVID vs., say, caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides, etc.). For example the US suicide rate declined from 2018 to 2019, but went back up in 2020. Naively assuming that all of the increase was due to the effects of the lockdowns would attribute ~2,880 suicides to them (or more if in a counterfactual world the su…

You could compare the excess deaths for New Zealand, South Korea, Australia and other countries that were able to prevent Sars-CoV-2 from spreading with strict lockdowns.

Diagnostic delays are not caused by lockdowns. They are caused by an overwhelmed health care system or the fear of infection, both of which are caused by high incidence.

You also need to consider the damage that long covid possibly do over the next 30 years. If only 1% of the working age population that got infected suffers permanent disability, then the cost-benefit analysis will show that a low incidence strategy is clearly the better strategy.

Here are the statistics for Australia. They had a strict lockdown when cases where high.

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provis...

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#60

Post by viraptor »

HideousKojima wrote: post #40

I'm curious if there's a good way to breakdown how much is caused by COVID vs., say, caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides, etc.). For example the US suicide rate declined from 2018 to 2019, but went back up in 2020. Naively assuming that all of the increase was due to the effects of the lockdowns would attribute ~2,880 suicides to them (or more if in a counterfactual world the su…

> caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides, etc.)

That's a dangerous way to phrase it. People would delay the elective medical procedures due to covid, even without lockdown. Overwhelmed hospitals would enforce the same. The covid/lockdown split of excess deaths is very complicated in itself.

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