Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19 • Hacker News Board

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#61

Post by Revery42 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #45

mywittyname wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Something to consider if you see anyone trying to downplay this. Most of the downplaying I've seen has revolved around the idea that those who died would have, "died anyway" from some other ailment or that hospitals are finding any reason they can to attribute deaths to covid. So, while you have a great argument, I doubt you'll change any minds because those who disagree flat out reject your premise.

For the former, if someone is actually willing to listen to evidence, you can cite them numbers of average years of life lost per covid death (~15).

And for the latter, you can cite excess mortality rates.

Good example of the asymmetry of bullshit here.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#62

Post by tidydata » Fri, May 07, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

chmod600 wrote: post #13

It looks like Florida is two shades "better" than California in the diagram, which would put the total Florida death rate as better than California. That would be interesting because Florida did almost no lockdown. How could that be?

I think you’re talking about Figure 5 which is the ratio of total to reported COVID related deaths. This would mean that CA underreported COVID related deaths compared to Florida.

Figure 7, the cumulative total death rate, is probably more relevant to the point you’re trying to make, in which case FL and CA are in the same bin.

One conclusion you might draw is that the effectiveness of lockdowns cannot be inferred from this single map.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#63

Post by mywittyname » Fri, May 07, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

Teknoman117 wrote: post #4

This is anecdotal at best, but when my grandfather passed last May from COVID, his death certificate did not record the cause of death as COVID. He tested negative twice after his month long bought with it, but only lived for another few weeks until dying of respiratory failure. We were told that because he was not testing positive at the time of death, his cause of death could not be recorded as COVID. I thought cau…

I'm pretty sure there have been non-detectable covid variants in the wild in the US for months now. I went through this with my mother, she was admitted to the hospital for a surgery and contracted some kind of "flu." She tested negative several times for covid. She stayed with me to convalesce and I came down with a "flu" in the middle of summer that had most of the symptoms of covid, except the loss of taste/smell. But my PCR test came back negative.

I also had zero side-effects from my vaccine, which I understand is supposed to make people feel sick the day after the second dose.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#64

Post by ars » Fri, May 07, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

chmod600 wrote: post #13

It looks like Florida is two shades "better" than California in the diagram, which would put the total Florida death rate as better than California. That would be interesting because Florida did almost no lockdown. How could that be?

Maybe lockdown is not as effective as people think - not for deaths anyway (I'm sure it keeps case numbers down).

For deaths it seems by far the most important is not lockdown, but rather protecting elderly. So maybe Florida prioritized that, and didn't spend effort on lockdown, while California prioritized lockdown thinking it would also help elderly.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#65

Post by hervature » Fri, May 07, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

As others have pointed out the death toll from COVID is truly astounding. Get your vaccines if you can.

That being said, excess mortality is not purely from COVID. There are widely reported drops in treatment for various cancers [1,2,3]. The link between COVID and diabetes is also very complicated and will take years to figure out what happened. The grim bright side is that we've seemed to hit peak excess deaths and may be dipping below and so the 900k number might decrease a little moving forward [4].

[1] - https://www.breastcancer.org/treatment/covid-19-and-breast-c... [2] - https://ascopubs.org/doi/full/10.1200/CCI.20.00134 [3] - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/fullarticle/27... [4] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#66

Post by whimsicalism » Fri, May 07, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #37

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #2

In absolute number terms it's more deaths in total in the USA than the Spanish Flu (675k deaths total since it began), HIV (700k deaths total since it began) or any other pandemic. Population has increased so the US did lose a smaller percentage of population but on the other hand Spanish Flu didn't have a vaccine to stop it one year in. Hopefully enough of the population takes the vaccine now to stop this. Note this…

We'll have to wait 20+yr for the controversy to simmer down but I bet when you run the numbers using a metric like YPLL (which is the typical metric used for these sorts of comparisons) the difference between Covid and other big pandemic outbreaks over history is going to be more minor.

Very back of hand numbers, but, assuming this article is true (haven't looked into it)

900,000 death * 15 yll/death [0] = 13.5 million YLL

vs

~63 million YLL for Spanish Flu and 0.5 million YLL for typical flu season [1]

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83040-3

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2843747/

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#67

Post by timr » Fri, May 07, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #16

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #2

In absolute number terms it's more deaths in total in the USA than the Spanish Flu (675k deaths total since it began), HIV (700k deaths total since it began) or any other pandemic. Population has increased so the US did lose a smaller percentage of population but on the other hand Spanish Flu didn't have a vaccine to stop it one year in. Hopefully enough of the population takes the vaccine now to stop this. Note this…

>Something to consider if you see anyone trying to downplay this. Most of the downplaying I've seen has revolved around the idea that those who died would have, "died anyway" from some other ailment or that hospitals are finding any reason they can to attribute deaths to covid. So, while you have a great argument, I doubt you'll change any minds because those who disagree flat out reject your premise.

"Most of the downplaying I've seen has revolved around the idea that those who died would have, "died anyway" from some other ailment or that hospitals are finding any reason they can to attribute deaths to covid."

The authors of this are doing exactly the same thing, but from the other direction:

> Given that there is insufficient evidence to estimate these contributions to excess mortality, for now we assume that total COVID-19 deaths equal excess mortality. For the reasons presented in this section, we believe that this is likely an underestimate.

This is all simply noise. The way we'll find out the answer to this question is when someone pulls the death certificates for 2020, and actually tabulates the percentage directly caused by Covid.

It will happen, but this work isn't it.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#68

Post by seoaeu » Fri, May 07, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

bsimpson wrote: post #12

Teknoman117 wrote: post #4

This is anecdotal at best, but when my grandfather passed last May from COVID, his death certificate did not record the cause of death as COVID. He tested negative twice after his month long bought with it, but only lived for another few weeks until dying of respiratory failure. We were told that because he was not testing positive at the time of death, his cause of death could not be recorded as COVID. I thought cau…

Gets manipulated in the other direction too: financial incentives nudge hospitals to assign coronavirus as a cause of death if you had it when you died, even if it wasn't what actually killed you. I don't know if it's as blatant as "died in a car crash of coronavirus," but enough of my medical friends have mentioned it that I believe there's truth to it.

Since when are hospitals paid for having their patients die a specific way?

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#69

Post by AnotherGoodName » Fri, May 07, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #51

whimsicalism wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the former, if someone is actually willing to listen to evidence, you can cite them numbers of average years of life lost per covid death (~15).

>you can cite them numbers of average years of life lost per covid death That's practically inviting them to cite back the average life lost from the 1918 flu. If you're trying to counter someone who's downplaying Covid that is probably not something you should invite them to do.

That's fine though. If they point out that COVID is merely in the same order of magnitude but not objectively worse than Spanish Flu then the point that COVID should not be downplayed has been won.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#70

Post by ArkanExplorer » Fri, May 07, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

chmod600 wrote: post #13

It looks like Florida is two shades "better" than California in the diagram, which would put the total Florida death rate as better than California. That would be interesting because Florida did almost no lockdown. How could that be?

When ranked by COVID deaths per capita, Sweden is #27:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

We should be concluding that lockdown and masks leads to more deaths, not less (or at the very least that they are an unjustifiably expensive public health intervention), and begin rolling back all restrictions immediately.