Excess Deaths in 2020 • Hacker News Board

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#71

Post by lettergram » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:20 PM UTC

gloryless wrote: post #51

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

The government has an incentive to report deaths as covid deaths. I'm simply stating it is not 100% clear what causes the deaths. The reason I suspect a higher suicide rate than otherwise estimated is that the number of people with suicidal ideation has doubled.

NOTE, I was also considering unintentional suicide (overdoses), which were dramatically up (38%).

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-death...

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/16/suicides-fell-in-2020-w...

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#72

Post by HideousKojima » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

awild wrote: post #24

StavrosK wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt the entire US became sharply more obese in the past year, though, so much so that it also died from it.

I'm assuming tokai is saying that because obese people are more likely to have complications from Covid19, the US saw a higher increase in excess deaths, given that the obesity rate is higher than eg Germany.

This also explains some of the racial disparities in COVID deaths since the obesity rate for blacks is 49.6% vs 44.8% for Hispanics, 42.2% for whites, and 17.4% for Asians

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#73

Post by audunw » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

heswrongsoru wrote: post #43

StavrosK wrote: post #2

This is terrible, but at least I can show this to my "AlL-CaUsE MorTAlItY WiLl Be tHe SaMe" friend so he can ignore it.

You're made for each other. Excess deaths capture the deaths from lockdown related causes too, like my grandmother, who died when her social life was indefinitely stopped, and teenagers that committed suicide due to lockdowns Excess deaths don't tell us how deadly COVID really was, they tell us how deadly COVID plus the COVID response really were. Someday historians will argue: which was worse? The disease or the tre…

The problem with blaming the response, is that a strong response with very strict lockdowns is sometimes a result of a weak early response. That is, if you hesitate with doing lockdowns, you'll eventually be forced to do a much more severe and longer lasting lockdown anyway. A weak response will also overrun the hospitals, which makes it difficult for them to diagnose and treat other diseases.

Norway has had no significant excess mortality through the entire pandemic. In recent months it has been well below 0%. It has been consistently been better than Sweden, which has had less restrictions and a similar culture.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...

The restrictions in Norway has been less severe than many places with higher excess mortality. Why is that? My theory is that Norwegians have been very compliant with advice and restrictions set by the government, and the government has been pro-active with enacting restrictions. This has helped contain and suppress the spread of the virus to smaller geographical regions, so that other areas can avoid lockdowns. And it reduces the duration of outbreaks, meaning you can lift restrictions again more quickly.

So my theory is that fighting against restrictions is extremely counter-productive. It only serves to create a culture of ignoring government advice, and makes politicians hesitate to enact necessary restrictions early, with the end result being more restrictions in total, not less.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#74

Post by caddemon » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #67

caddemon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is exactly what the article did in its first graph.

Unless I'm missing something they only use a single 5 year window to look at the 2020 peak. I meant if you slide the window back over the past 50 years, what other peaks show up and how much larger are they then the other years in their window?

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#75

Post by RacfeelBudkind » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

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…

On the other hand Covid-19 would have killed many more people directly if action hadn't been taken to mitigate it's spread. Probably exponentially more people, based on how viruses typically spread.

In other words, the comparison isn't between how many people Covid-19 did kill and how many preventative measures did. It's between how many it would have killed and how many preventative measures did. While there's a lot of uncertainty in how many people Covid-19 would have killed, it's still certainly higher than the preventative measures.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#76

Post by SketchySeaBeast » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:23 PM UTC

caddemon wrote: post #74

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is exactly what the article did in its first graph.

Unless I'm missing something they only use a single 5 year window to look at the 2020 peak. I meant if you slide the window back over the past 50 years, what other peaks show up and how much larger are they then the other years in their window?

Ah, I misunderstood your point. You're missing nothing.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#77

Post by klahnakoski2 » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:25 PM UTC

I see the 2020 mortality no different from other years: https://github.com/klahnakoski/mo-statcan#example---covid-19

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#78

Post by pnutjam » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:26 PM UTC

heswrongsoru wrote: post #43

StavrosK wrote: post #2

This is terrible, but at least I can show this to my "AlL-CaUsE MorTAlItY WiLl Be tHe SaMe" friend so he can ignore it.

You're made for each other. Excess deaths capture the deaths from lockdown related causes too, like my grandmother, who died when her social life was indefinitely stopped, and teenagers that committed suicide due to lockdowns Excess deaths don't tell us how deadly COVID really was, they tell us how deadly COVID plus the COVID response really were. Someday historians will argue: which was worse? The disease or the tre…

I love it when people who ignore all the data and intelligent discussion around a subject argue that people aren't listening to them.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#79

Post by samth » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:28 PM UTC

heswrongsoru wrote: post #43

StavrosK wrote: post #2

This is terrible, but at least I can show this to my "AlL-CaUsE MorTAlItY WiLl Be tHe SaMe" friend so he can ignore it.

You're made for each other. Excess deaths capture the deaths from lockdown related causes too, like my grandmother, who died when her social life was indefinitely stopped, and teenagers that committed suicide due to lockdowns Excess deaths don't tell us how deadly COVID really was, they tell us how deadly COVID plus the COVID response really were. Someday historians will argue: which was worse? The disease or the tre…

Suicides were down in 2020 in the US. Australia had long and strict lockdowns, so has Vietnam. But they have negative excess deaths in 2020. There's no evidence whatsoever that lockdowns increased deaths, with the possible exception of an increase in fatal traffic accidents due to more speeding.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#80

Post by Retric » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:31 PM UTC

xxxxxxx12 wrote: post #56

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. T…

That’s exactly the kind of paper you get when economists are publishing outside their specialty. Most interesting example was he excluded any data that was counter to his theory and used highly overfit data. “Whether Atkeson (February 2021) has correctly modeled the Covid-19 virus is not at issue.”

They can’t exactly do cost benefit analysis without models to compare, but their cherry picking models to support their assumptions and then happy that their assumptions where validated by their models.