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Excess Deaths in 2020

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Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#171

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

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.

> Overwhelmed hospitals would enforce the same.

Not necessarily. There is always the option of triaging COVID victims into palliative care (which can be very fast and administered even by non-specialist personnel) and away from intensive care. While that has never been official policy due to the political optics, there have been claims that it was done on a hospital-by-hospital basis in Italy and Sweden for elderly victims. If the voting public were clearly informed that it was an option they could choose as an alternative to lockdowns, it may well have seen significant support from the population.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#172

Post by ghaff »

dennis_jeeves wrote: post #161
erfgh wrote: post #98

I'm suprised by the number of people arguing for and against the lockdowns using just deaths statistics. Lockdowns of the duration that we experienced should be illegal because they take away the citizens' liberties to an extent that no government should be able to take them away. It has nothing to do with health.

>Lockdowns of the duration that we experienced should be illegal I fully agree with you. If people want to sit at home it should be a personal choice. However people do like to control other peoples lives, that is the bottom line and they will use any argument to justify it.

The thing is though that, by and large, there never were "lockdowns" in the US. I'm sure there are exceptions but most people were free to go out in public if they wanted to (perhaps with masks/distancing), many types of "essential" businesses remained open, etc.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#173

Post by bjornsing »

whizzter wrote: post #150
bjornsing wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the UK a study predicts a 7.9-9.6% increase in breast cancer deaths within 5 years of diagnosis due to diagnostic delays caused by COVID. [...] Basically I guess what I'm really trying to get at is that while COVID is certainly a terrible disease, there seems to have been little to no cost-benefit analysis performed by policy makers regarding the lockdowns and other attempts to combat it. I see this line of reas…

As a datapoint on Sweden, we have a normally pretty well functioning breast cancer screening system where women between 40-74 are to be offered a screening opportunity every other year. In 2019 more than 800 000 screenings were done (with 8288 cancer cases discovered in the country that year) and this system has been credited for pushing down the yearly cancer deaths due to earlier discoveries. In 2020 there was 160…

Ok, but again: The primary reason for this is the significant spread of SARS-CoV-2 which has overwhelmed hospitals. This in turn could have been prevented with lockdown(s). Right?

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#174

Post by gmiller123456 »

joshuamorton wrote: post #167
gmiller123456 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Excess deaths exceeded COVID deaths every week of the pandemic: https://i.imgur.com/MeGMsRx.png Not entirely sure how to parse that statement, but I think most people would interpret that as "non-COVID excess deaths exceeded COVID deaths", which doesn't match what's on your graph. E.g. for week 15, expected deaths = 55k, deaths - COVID = 63k and all deaths=79k. The only truthful way to interpret your statement is th…

It is very interesting. It means that either covid deaths were undercounted, or something else unique to 2020 also killed a large number of people, or both.

It appears as though you're using the first interpretation, and assuming it's true. It is not. I agree it'd be very interesting if true.

The second interpretation (which is the one I called "not interesting") just means there was at least one non COVID death in each interval, and the total deaths never dropped below the average number of deaths. One could reasonably assume there was at least one non-COVID death per week, making that part of the statistic useless, and you could just state the total deaths.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#175

Post by joshuamorton »

gmiller123456 wrote: post #174
joshuamorton wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very interesting. It means that either covid deaths were undercounted, or something else unique to 2020 also killed a large number of people, or both.

It appears as though you're using the first interpretation, and assuming it's true. It is not. I agree it'd be very interesting if true. The second interpretation (which is the one I called "not interesting") just means there was at least one non COVID death in each interval, and the total deaths never dropped below the average number of deaths. One could reasonably assume there was at least one non-COVID death per w…

No I'm using the second interpretation. It doesn't mean that there was one non covid death on each interval, but that there was one non covid death above the baseline of the expected number of deaths. Or in other words, deaths were always higher than expected, even after accounting for deaths attributed to covid.

The number of unattributed excess deaths is fewer than the number of covid attributed excess deaths, bit it should be zero, because the null hypothesis is that the only things killing people are "the same stuff as last year" and covid.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#176

Post by xxxxxxx12 »

joshuamorton wrote: post #170
xxxxxxx12 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reality doesn’t line up with your preconceived notions I'm claiming this precise thing, that you're arrogantly presuming that everyone can just hole up in their house like the elite class of people who do nothing but berate the (almost always) lower class people who do not have the privilege to stay home.

> that you're arrogantly presuming that everyone Gp didn't claim that. You're putting words in their mouth and lashing out for things they never said. A reasonable interpretation of their claims is that even if not everyone can hole up, government policies that are intense encourage everyone to hole up as much as they can. It's also worth mentioning that many, many working class people did not enjoy the fact that the…

You do realize that normative claims like "they ought", "government should", etc. are precisely the faculty-lounge, haughty idealism, that's worth absolutely nothing to people as they are, spoken from a position of privilege, condescension and fake expertise?

Notice how teachers act as though they're above everyone else? Refusing to work, whereas normal people that aren't of means largely kept working, and didn't act like paranoid agoraphobes exaggerating their actual risk?

It's no secret that most people overestimate their risk by an order(if not multiple) of magnitude.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#177

Post by CodeWriter23 »

jnwatson wrote: post #159
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #115

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.

We don't have a system where you hit 75 years old and drop dead. Everybody got a year older, and ~21% of those were baby boomers. The statistical impact of that on a year-by-year basis is minimal.

On average, that’s exactly the system we have. Nice attempt at sounding authoritative while attempting to invert a fundamental reality, that more births obviously results in more deaths.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#178

Post by joshuamorton »

xxxxxxx12 wrote: post #176
joshuamorton wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that you're arrogantly presuming that everyone Gp didn't claim that. You're putting words in their mouth and lashing out for things they never said. A reasonable interpretation of their claims is that even if not everyone can hole up, government policies that are intense encourage everyone to hole up as much as they can. It's also worth mentioning that many, many working class people did not enjoy the fact that the…

You do realize that normative claims like "they ought", "government should", etc. are precisely the faculty-lounge, haughty idealism, that's worth absolutely nothing to people as they are , spoken from a position of privilege, condescension and fake expertise? Notice how teachers act as though they're above everyone else? Refusing to work, whereas normal people that aren't of means largely kept working, and didn't ac…

This has nothing to do with what I or the other poster said. I'll reiterate that many people who were forced to work were not happy about that fact.

You're somewhere between pretending those people don't exist and claiming that those lower class people who didn't want to work but had to are also morally bankrupt. It's neither coherent nor respectful of those you claim to be defending.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#179

Post by melling »

floxy wrote: post #152
melling wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much other causation have you looked into? For example population density? Miami is a small city of 500,000 people.

The Miami metropolitan area population is 6,000,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic... ...with a density of 1004 people / sq. mi., compared to the NY metro area with a density of 5313 people / sq. mi.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area#com...

Yes, NY is clearly is densely populated. I guess I would look for the differences with California.

LA has more people (13.2 million) but appears to be less densely populated with 550 people per sq mile.

I didn’t follow California but I know Florida was offered as a place that not locking down worked.

I can look into it a little more. Florida has a lot of cases, and most came after the first wave. The same with Texas.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#180

Post by gmiller123456 »

joshuamorton wrote: post #175
gmiller123456 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears as though you're using the first interpretation, and assuming it's true. It is not. I agree it'd be very interesting if true. The second interpretation (which is the one I called "not interesting") just means there was at least one non COVID death in each interval, and the total deaths never dropped below the average number of deaths. One could reasonably assume there was at least one non-COVID death per w…

No I'm using the second interpretation. It doesn't mean that there was one non covid death on each interval, but that there was one non covid death above the baseline of the expected number of deaths. Or in other words, deaths were always higher than expected, even after accounting for deaths attributed to covid. The number of unattributed excess deaths is fewer than the number of covid attributed excess deaths, bit…

>there was one non covid death above the baseline of the expected number of deaths

While a true (and interesting) statement, that's not what the OP said. He said "Excess deaths exceeded COVID deaths", not "Excess deaths minus COVID deaths exceeded expected deaths". Again, the second statement is true (based on his graph), but not all all what he said.

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