81–90 of 387 posts
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Yep, and it's a suspect one at best. Personally I wouldn't trust a stastical model from someone who advertises that they own the book "how to lie with statistics" and obviously used it
I mean that book is basically required reading for Statistics 101. Doesn't everyone have a copy?
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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?
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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?
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.
As well, you get the over-the-top cases where someone that dies of a gunshot is included in the covid death count[0].
Some states have tried to do better by breaking it down a little finer. Like Colorado provides[1] a breakdown down by confirmed vs probable. But the data here is still not great.
[0] https://www.kmov.com/news/colorado-coroner-calling-out-how-s...
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>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 t…
For me its shocking that we as a population have become so numb to so much death around us. Wonder what it says about society in general. Would be fascinating to read any research reports on that aspect.
If the news were running 24/7 with reels of disaster porn - images of people dying in ICUs, or struggling to breathe and unable to get treatment, we'd have been taking this problem seriously last year. Instead, it's this abstract, sanitized problem that only happens to other people.
What you don't see on the TV isn't real.
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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.
I've found it is helpful to count by equivalent number of deaths to something that the person has actually experienced, as it is way too easy to brush away deaths that occurred in 1918.
For instance, it's as if you took the number of years of life lost in 9/11 and multiplied it by 120.
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>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.
I think it's kind of unlucky in some ways that Covid affected the old/unhealthy so disproportionately. I feel like we would have responded in a much more assertive and effective way had that not been the case. More people who were not in the risk groups would (ironically) have been saved, and we'd be a lot further on the road to recovery. Not a lot of young people know a huge amount of people in the risk groups, it's…
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"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 t…
No, because without tests, doctors didn’t uniformly attribute deaths correctly to covid, and often the official causes of death even in cases of cancer are often “pneumonia” or sepsis, or organ failure — the literal thing that killed them at the moment of death, not the cause of the symptom that overwhelmed the body.
Moreover, we know that there are examples of the opposite: deaths where Covid was on the certificate as a contributing factor, but not the primary cause. These aren't hard to find.
An 85 year-old with congestive heart failure and late-stage cancer and Covid reflects the modal situation here. It isn't some theoretical event -- it's incredibly common.
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.
(I mean, that definitely happened, but I haven’t seen analysis quantifying the significance of the total contribution.)
There’s a whole lot of omitted confounding variables in the “compare aggregate totals and jump to policy conclusions” games people are playing.