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Excess Deaths in 2020

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Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#121

Post by deeg »

CountDrewku wrote: post #110
allturtles wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are talking out of both sides of your mouth. How is it that people who think the lockdowns were net beneficial need to wait 'decades' to decide, but you're allowed to conclude now that they were a terrible idea? It seems to me we should all state our positions now with the information we have available now, and let the future take care of itself.

Because he/she stated it as a personal opinion while the other person said it as a matter of fact that couldn't be questioned. I'll go a step further and actually suggest that authoritarian lockdown measure haven't done as much as they've been touted as doing. This is pretty easy to see by comparing states with less lockdown measures vs. ones that went full economy shutdown. Most of the "open" states aren't any worse…

What states are you comparing? Massachusetts and NYC locked down pretty hard and their post-April numbers look pretty good compared to, say, Texas, Florida, and South Dakota.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#122

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

CountDrewku wrote: post #116
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Because by accepting these measures now I can guarantee they'll become the new norm just like the changes after 9/11.

What measures are you referring to with this? Masks clearly aren't going to stay around, and there's a push to reopen everything and get life back to normal as soon as possible.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#123

Post by chrisco255 »

aqme28 wrote: post #117
xorfish wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's absolutely no correlation between lockdown policy and mortality. For example, click the link above and compare Florida to California. Florida has been wide open since last summer (over 9 months now) and has performed about the same as California. And you can cherry pick Hawaii, but New York and New Jersey have been among the most strict lockdowns and they find themselves in the top 3.

It seems to help to be an island country or state though, or a geographically isolated region like South Korea or Alaska, as they can screen people coming into the country and there's not a lot of cross-pollination with tight border controls.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#124

Post by [deleted] »

ghaff wrote: post #120
hedora wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#125

Post by petertodd »

tiahura wrote: post #35
euroclydon wrote: post #12

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?

'Tragic': Driving Was Down In 2020, But Traffic Fatality Rates Surged The National Safety Council (NSC) says deaths from motor vehicles rose 8% last year, with as many as 42,060 people dying in vehicle crashes. When comparing traffic deaths to the number of miles driven, the rate of fatalities rose 24% — the highest spike in nearly a century, NSC says. https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/974006735/tragic-driving-was-...

Remember that kinetic energy is proportional to velocity squared. So if less traffic is letting people drive faster, that could easily result in more deaths. I live in a city, and average speeds certainly seem faster than pre-pandemic traffic.

Also, working at home may be allowing people to avoid traffic because hours are less strict. Again, that would allow traffic to move faster on average.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#126

Post by mxcrossb »

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…

> there seems to have been little to no cost-benefit analysis performed by policy makers regarding the lockdowns and other attempts to combat it.

What evidence do you have of this? This seems like a baseless criticism.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#127

Post by watwut »

015UUZn8aEvW wrote: post #47
StavrosK wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

America is country with most strict safety standards in pretty much anything I ever heard of. Including kids playground structures.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#128

Post by watwut »

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…

> teenagers that committed suicide due to lockdowns

This turned out to be false expectation. Turns out that while teenagers were unhappy and did not enjoyed the situation, they were able to adapt without destroying themselves.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#129

Post by tgb »

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…

They're arguing simultaneously "lockdowns had no impact on people's behavior and therefore had no benefit" and "lockdowns had massive negative costs". Lo and behold that is the exact mistake the paper is making! It's basing the cost analysis off the following question:

>Suppose you could either live a year of life in the COVID era, or X months under normal conditions. What’s the value of X that makes the AVERAGE American indifferent?

Yet you'll notice this is not about lockdown versus non-lockdown this is "normal" versus COVID. Moreover, the number they use for X is just made-up. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black - this is the exact mistake the author goes on and on about for the other side of the cost/benefit equation.

This paper is super sketchy in other ways - it's clearly a personal diatribe, not an attempt to be accurate. Like:

> Lockdown is a formal,state-mandated “one size fits all” version of the social norm “keep your distancefrom people who are sick."

Is the author unaware of asymptomatic transmission? If all we had to do was keep away from sick people, then this would have been a SARS-1 outcome.

> As a result, the ICL model made some dire predictions ... For instance: “In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour ... In total,in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US...”

The US has achieved 1/4 of those deaths with behavioral changes (from lockdowns or not), so 2 million without any behavioral changes seems like a good estimate from early data.

Fig 2B is clearly over-fit on past data. I doubt it will hold up well.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#130

Post by petertodd »

chrisco255 wrote: post #123
aqme28 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even by state. Hawaii had a strict lockdown but low excess mortality. Arizona and Texas had weak lockdowns but high excess mortality.

There's absolutely no correlation between lockdown policy and mortality. For example, click the link above and compare Florida to California. Florida has been wide open since last summer (over 9 months now) and has performed about the same as California. And you can cherry pick Hawaii, but New York and New Jersey have been among the most strict lockdowns and they find themselves in the top 3. It seems to help to be a…

> Florida has been wide open since last summer (over 9 months now) and has performed about the same as California.

Remember that Florida has a significantly older population than California too. 2.1% of the population >85 years old vs 1.3%; 17.6% over 65 years old vs 10.6%. COVID deaths are very concentrated in the elderly. The CDC estimates that the 85+ age group has a 8700x higher chance an infection leading to death, and a 95x higher chance of infection leading to hospitalization, than the 5-17 age group. The article appears to be using non-age-adjusted excess deaths. So California and Florida being equal is a strong sign that California did significantly worse.

https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/florida/demographic-sta...

https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/demographic-...

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...

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