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Excess Deaths in 2020

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Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#111

Post by xxxxxxx12 »

Clewza313 wrote: post #90
xxxxxxx12 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They've got a fundamentally different society and lockdown is a luxury policy that only rich nations (and people) can afford.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#112

Post by ansible »

Clewza313 wrote: post #90
xxxxxxx12 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yup. Having insufficient bed space and medical supplies will kill people that might otherwise have survived a Covid-19 infection.

Anything and everything must be done in each country to prevent the hospitals from filling up.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#113

Post by petertodd »

sgt101 wrote: post #100
RacfeelBudkind wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think, very sadly, that India is giving us an insight now. It must be remembered that the situation in India is into a society with some immunity from earlier infections and also some immunity from vaccination (I think ~10% combined) which muddies the water a bit. But, still the picture of an unmoderated c19 epidemic is horrifying.

Something I haven't found is detailed breakdowns of who is actually being infected this time around.

India did have very strict lockdowns. Yet, very high rates of antibodies were also measured in some areas. Those strict lockdowns may have been successful in shielding some of the population from covid, and that part of the population is getting infected now. India is a very unequal society, with a very wide range of wealth present in the same areas.

In the US in some lockdown states there have been dramatic differences between infection rates between different socioeconomic levels. While in other states that were more open, that has tended to be less true.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#114

Post by watwut »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #89
joshuahedlund wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is going to depend which place and group of people you talk about. Suicides of Jews in Germany went up by the start of WW2 - source is Richard J Evans; Third Reich Trilogy. He had no stats about non-jews. But, being oppressed and humiliated definitely made some Jewish Germans to kill themselves. (Convolute phrase, but plenty of them considered themselves Germans, so.)

And it was much easier to commit suicide by lettin other people kill you too.

America is might be different, because it did not happened on their soil.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#115

Post by CodeWriter23 »

Big problem with this type of calculation: it is based on the prior n-years of data. These figures do not consider that the just this year, the leading edge of Baby Boomers are achieving their average life expectancy and dying. There needs to be some corrective math that takes the birth rate at (current year - average life expectancy) into account.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#116

Post by CountDrewku »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #64
015UUZn8aEvW wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Before COVID, I was under the impression that most Americans found "Give me liberty or give me death" an admirable sentiment. 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,…

Are you suggesting that since we didn't have full liberty before the pandemic we should be ok with less liberty during the pandemic and into the future? Because by accepting these measures now I can guarantee they'll become the new norm just like the changes after 9/11.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#117

Post by aqme28 »

xorfish wrote: post #59
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…

Or even by state. Hawaii had a strict lockdown but low excess mortality.

Arizona and Texas had weak lockdowns but high excess mortality.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#118

Post by petertodd »

viraptor wrote: post #60
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.

Since natural immunity is durable, an unmitigated pandemic would be over sooner. So in many circumstances the hospitals would be overloaded for less total time and thus lead to less non-covid excess deaths.

Here in Canada, excess deaths in 2020 for the 15 to 64 age range has been abnormally high, starting in March. Yet, unlike older age groups, the level of excess does not follow the pattern of reported COVID infections. That looks like deaths from lockdown and delayed medical care.

I personally know people who, for example, put off getting potential cancers checked out due to fear of covid. Similarly, I had to convince some people to go to the hospital for potentially serious non-covid symptoms who were afraid to do so because of covid.

Source: https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#119

Post by maxerickson »

sgt101 wrote: post #93
hedora wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>In the US, 33-50% of the population apparently had antibodies pre-vaccination Where did that number come from? I have read more like 8% ( https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)32009-2/full... ) So - 2 to 3x... Nope. 8 - 10x. What I want to know is why you have constructed this belief and want to propagate it when it is refuted by a google search in 10 seconds flat?

I wonder if the theory that previously infected people are reacting more strongly to the first doses is true?

I had no real reaction to the first one and a day of increased fatigue so far with the second.

Anecdotally, many more people are having stronger reactions to the second.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#120

Post by ghaff »

hedora wrote: post #106
spookthesunset wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probably exponentially more people, based on how viruses typically spread. It will be decades before we know the answer to this, if we ever do. Trying to justify these lockdowns while in the middle of the storm is fools errand. Heads are running way to hot and brains aren’t thinking clearly. What we’ve done over the last year represents one of the largest uncontrolled public health experiments ever performed. The b…

The lockdowns weren’t unprecedented. We did something similar in 1918, and it backfired in the same ways. As a bonus, last time, a much more deadly strain emerged and ended up ripping through the population killing young adults and middle aged people. If they hadn’t locked down for the first wave, they probably would have reached herd immunity before the second, more devastating wave. This time, we have a vaccine, so…

>We did something similar in 1918,

I looked at this a while back and, as far as I can tell, there were relatively limited interventions in the US. If you read beyond the headline of this link [1], for example, it doesn't seem as if you had much in the way of workplace closures and, in general the "non-pharmaceutical interventions" were for a fairly limited period of time. This study concludes they helped but the data is inconsistent and hard to interpret.

[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2007/08/study-sa...

"The researchers report that all the cities used at least one of the three main categories of NPIs, and 15 used all three at the same time. The most common combination was school closures and public gathering bans, used by 34 cities for a median of 4 weeks. All the cities except New York, Chicago, and New Haven (Conn.) closed their schools for some period of time; the median was 6 weeks."

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