61–70 of 220 posts
It's interesting that in "normal" years, deaths go up in the middle of the winter and down in the middle of the summer.
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While that would be interesting, it would be a less direct measure of COVID's impact, as other variables are introduced.
The tricky thing about discussing covid-19 mortality is that there are always confounding variables. The disease is deadlier for people with pre-existing conditions, particularly cardiovascular. A common line of argument online is "it's just the flu, and we don't panic like this for flu season every year." Observing a spike in total deaths puts that line of thought to the test.
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 "what ifs" get harder to calculate.
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I don't understand your argument. You're saying that because people didn't mind dying from infectous diseases at a time where scraping your hand could prove deadly, we shouldn't mind it today either?
It's not a question of what people "mind" or "don't mind", it's a question of what level of risk people will accept in order to live a normal life. Hiding away from people may reduce risk in a lot of ways, but most people find it unacceptable. Before COVID, I was under the impression that most Americans found "Give me liberty or give me death" an admirable sentiment. But it turns out that I was mistaken about that.
Are you under the impression that you were experiencing pure liberty before COVID? Because it's pretty obvious to me that there was an acceptable level of restraints that society generally agreed to, and those levels changed due to the pandemic. It's a fun saying, but it's in no way, shape, or form realistic.
In a year when Geico is giving their customers an across the board rebate on their premiums because driving miles are down so much, and driving accidents are the third or fourth leading cause of death in a non-pandemic year, I think we'd need to adjust downward the baseline. I wonder if these calculations take that into account?
Driving deaths are up: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/974006735/tragic-driving-was-...
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
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Why?
In a vacuum it would give you more of a sense about how much of an outlier this year was. But obviously enough other things have changed over the last 50 years that the numbers would stop being comparable. Perhaps looking at a 5 year sliding window to see how big the peaks usually are relative to their surrounding years could get at this with a bit less confounding.
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…
why did you link to stats that only go to 2018?
Suicides are down in 2020[1]
1. https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-me...
For international data, The Economist has the charts of excess mortality through 2020 for different countries: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
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This is nonsense. Suicides are down in 2020. It was a virus that killed people, the deaths were reported. Conspiracy theories are so exhausting
You say that with such certainy but the official number I've seen is a 10% increase. Also there is no measure for misery.