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Excess Deaths in 2020

kieranhealy.org

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Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#81

Post by altacc »

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…

The problem with "what about other increases in cause of deaths" is that you have to find a LOT of these reasons to even begin to compete with Covid-19 as a cause. When the increase in deaths is in the hundreds of thousands it is not adequate to point to something that potentially increased the deaths by hundreds or thousands and say that's enough evidence that the Covid numbers are grossly inflated. You need to provide evidence backing your claims for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Looking at the NIMH link you sent, I'm not sure where you're pulling that data from as 65+ isn't in the chart but some quick maths shows it would be about 9k people, so your assumed 100% increase would only lead to an extra 9k deaths from suicide in that group. The total for all age groups is 48k, so you'd need a 200% increase in all ages to get to that number.

However, if we look at this, based on CDC data: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234 "From 2019 to 2020 ... suicide deaths declined by 5.6%." So you really need some strong evidence to back that suicides went up at all, let alone by 100%. It would also be very difficult to blame false attribution of suicide deaths to Covid-19 without equally strong evidence as there are usually pretty strong clues to the cause of death in suicides.

The riots & associated high levels of aggression between social groups did not lead to a high number of deaths, definitely not enough to have a significant impact on total deaths, unless you have a good source for that claim.

Murder rates seem to be up by about 36.7% across the US, but even then that increase is not enough to cause a significant bump in the numbers. There are normally about 870 deaths per 100,000 in the US due to all causes. Murder is about 5 in 100,000 (2018) so a 36.7% increase in that 5 gives 7, an increase in 2 per 100,000. That's an increase in the death rate of 0.23% due to increased murder. The CDC number I just checked is a 15.9% increase in deaths for 2020.

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/06/953254623/massive-1-year-rise... https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e2.htm

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#82

Post by HideousKojima »

Retric wrote: post #80
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…

The point he's making in that section is that by accounting for voluntary changes in human behavior (or failing to account for it as many models did) will drastically affect the results of any model that attempts to predict the rate of spread.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#83

Post by StavrosK »

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…

> 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

If only we had an easy mathematical tool to calculate how many people in the excess mortality numbers didn't die of COVID. We could call it "subtraction".

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#84

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

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 obvious way to do this analysis is to look at all cause death rates in countries that locked down successfully, like china, new zealand, or australia, and see that there was no spike

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#85

Post by jonplackett »

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…

I thought that the purpose of lockdown (in the UK at least) was to prevent health care from being overwhelmed, at which point deaths would drastically increase.

So we don't really know how many people would have died without lockdown to make a comparison, but it would have been a lot higher.

If the health service is completely overloaded it means people would start dying from all sorts of other things too.

Am I missing the point?

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#86

Post by xxxxxxx12 »

jonplackett wrote: post #85
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…

I thought that the purpose of lockdown (in the UK at least) was to prevent health care from being overwhelmed, at which point deaths would drastically increase. So we don't really know how many people would have died without lockdown to make a comparison, but it would have been a lot higher. If the health service is completely overloaded it means people would start dying from all sorts of other things too. Am I missi…

> I thought that the purpose of lockdown (in the UK at least) was to prevent health care from being overwhelmed

Which never really pans out (field hospitals, hospital ship sent to NYC, etc.) - they got strained and perhaps local spots overwhelmed, but never doomsday scenarios we hear bandied about without any evidence. His point is that lockdown doesn't really change behavior and places that don't have strong mandates end up largely practicing safer behavior anyway.

I think there's also a strong argument that lockdown ends up decreasing the time spent outdoors, which promotes spread.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#87

Post by hedora »

RacfeelBudkind wrote: post #75
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…

In the US, 33-50% of the population apparently had antibodies pre-vaccination, and we apparently did a terrible job keeping it out of nursing homes (so the percentage that caught it that died was higher than it would have been across the whole population).

So, it would have killed 2-3x more people, max. There were strategies that were developed after the 1918 pandemic that probably would have saved more people than the lockdown at much lower cost, but they were ignored by the politicians. The basic idea was to focus all resources on protecting the vulnerable, and let the disease run its course quickly. Effectively protecting the vulnerable during extended lockdowns is extremely difficult, and the COVID lockdown was no exception.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#88

Post by xxxxxxx12 »

Retric wrote: post #80
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…

> and then happy that their assumptions where validated by their models

This was done in the pro-lockdown measures camp all the time, epidemiologists, etc. love using models based on assumptions that are used to show scenarios as evidence of the original assumptions.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#89

Post by AlwaysRock »

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…

Isnt that true during many major world events that are bad? I cant remember the study but I recall reading that during WW1 and WW2 suicides declined greatly even though it was a terrible time for many.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#90

Post by Clewza313 »

xxxxxxx12 wrote: post #86
jonplackett wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that the purpose of lockdown (in the UK at least) was to prevent health care from being overwhelmed, at which point deaths would drastically increase. So we don't really know how many people would have died without lockdown to make a comparison, but it would have been a lot higher. If the health service is completely overloaded it means people would start dying from all sorts of other things too. Am I missi…

> I thought that the purpose of lockdown (in the UK at least) was to prevent health care from being overwhelmed Which never really pans out (field hospitals, hospital ship sent to NYC, etc.) - they got strained and perhaps local spots overwhelmed, but never doomsday scenarios we hear bandied about without any evidence. His point is that lockdown doesn't really change behavior and places that don't have strong mandate…

If you're looking for a doomsday scenario, what's happening in India right now is probably the worst we've seen since the pandemic started. Essentially every hospital in every major city is full and there are patients dying outside.
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