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Excess Deaths in 2020

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Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#191

Post by ryandrake »

ghaff wrote: post #172
dennis_jeeves wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I know in my area, there was zero enforcement of travel restrictions, zero enforcement of stay-at-home, zero government enforcement of mask wearing (shops generally had to kick people out), and very spotty enforcement of business closures. There was no lockdown. It was totally voluntary, and luckily enough people voluntarily did the right thing that hospitals didn't overflow.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#192

Post by ryandrake »

lettergram wrote: post #71
gloryless wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-deat…

> The government has an incentive to report deaths as covid deaths.

What is this incentive? How did governments benefit from more covid deaths?

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#193

Post by viraptor »

ryandrake wrote: post #190
viraptor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I would argue that in a lot of places, including most of the USA, lockdown didn't really happen. We had these lame, unenforced stay-at-home "orders" which people ignored, mask "mandates" that were openly disregarded and even publicly protested, business "closures" that were unevenly enforced. I think you'd have a hard time correlating anything that happened in the USA in 2020 with a lockdown, since nothing was really…

Correct, there's a really big difference between the "lockdown" in most of the US and for example Melbourne.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#194

Post by ghaff »

ryandrake wrote: post #191
ghaff wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know in my area, there was zero enforcement of travel restrictions, zero enforcement of stay-at-home, zero government enforcement of mask wearing (shops generally had to kick people out), and very spotty enforcement of business closures. There was no lockdown. It was totally voluntary, and luckily enough people voluntarily did the right thing that hospitals didn't overflow.

Or people voluntarily did things like wearing masks/distancing indoors that presumably helped. I was more conservative personally but I'm not sure how much, say, driving to adjacent states for outdoor activities made a difference.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#195

Post by nucleardog »

ryandrake wrote: post #190
viraptor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I would argue that in a lot of places, including most of the USA, lockdown didn't really happen. We had these lame, unenforced stay-at-home "orders" which people ignored, mask "mandates" that were openly disregarded and even publicly protested, business "closures" that were unevenly enforced. I think you'd have a hard time correlating anything that happened in the USA in 2020 with a lockdown, since nothing was really…

Any question of “what impact did a lockdown have” should start with clarifying what constitutes a lockdown.

From that definition, I think a lot of the conclusions people are drawing would be substantially less surprising.

If we’re going to call a polite suggestion to stay home and a potential for small fines which were never or rarely levied a “lockdown” then it’s not surprising it had little impact.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#196

Post by nucleardog »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #171
viraptor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 v…

You think the public would have shown significant support for “just let the infected die”?

And you can add Canada to that list of countries that have had to do that, by the way. Like the others you mention it’s been a forced decision due to the healthcare system becoming overwhelmed.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#197

Post by postalrat »

spamizbad wrote: post #19
StavrosK wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, why is that?

Probably a combination of: - US letting it rip through vulnerable populations with the promise of "herd immunity" being right around the corner - Fewer hospital beds available in less populous areas. - Taking COVID seriously became a culture war issue. So while some countries might've had its youth catch it while mostly keeping it away from older populous, the US had the opposite: less vulnerable youth took it relati…

How does that explain Sweden? Or Germany. Or any of of the stats the person above you was replying to.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#198

Post by 22c »

bjornsing wrote: post #173
whizzter wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>overwhelmed hospitals

Something that has never been properly explained to me is how "overwhelmed" the hospitals were in relation to their normally "overwhelmed" state.

I wrote a script which extracted time series data from one of the hospital bed data APIs in my country around April last year and ran it for a couple of months. I wasn't able to make any useful conclusions from the data other than more patients were coming than going for a certain time periods and some wards had beds reassigned to other wards. It would have been a lot better if I had access to historical data to compare it to previous years.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#199

Post by haswell »

xxxxxxx12 wrote: post #183
joshuamorton wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Per your bio, you work at Google. You're divorced from the experience of struggling people.

That is an extremely presumptuous statement to make. You know nothing of their background, upbringing, path to where they are today. I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish in this thread anymore, but it certainly is not constructive.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#200

Post by titzer »

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…

Explain Melbourne, Australia.
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