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Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

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Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#201

Post by kurikuri »

timr wrote: post #20

This isn't a "study", it's a statistical model. It reflects the assumptions put into it. To wit: > Our analysis follows four key steps. First, for all locations where weekly or monthly all-cause mortality has been reported since the start of the pandemic, we estimate how much mortality increased compared to the expected death rate....Second, based on a range of studies and consideration of other evidence, we estimate…

But this wasn’t written to confirm that COVID was underreported, nor predict future results, it was written to estimate the mortality rate of the past year and a half. Your criticism doesn’t seem to hold here.

Also: The author cited the sources for their assumptions, specifically on COVID mortality classification.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#202

Post by newacct583 »

nickff wrote: post #118
newacct583 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely you'd agree that "2020 excess deaths are going to be predominantly covid" is a very reasonable hypothesis though, right? And you agree that "2020 has an extraordinarily high excess death rate", because that part is easily measured data, right? Basically: your response seems a bit nitpicky to me, which tells me that perhaps you're starting from a perspective where you're assuming the article is wrong and lookin…

I think the critique is more that the 'study' is really just a complicated statistical restatement of the assumption, so it doesn't prove or even highlight anything new or interesting.

That's some kind of relativist argument I don't understand. Modelling and theory is an important part of science. We have something that is difficult to measure independently, so we build models to derive an explanation from things we can measure. And they did that. And the results line up with the hypothesis.

I mean, duh. Usually hypotheses are right! You're right that it would be more interesting if it showed some kind of confounding effect or whatever.

But it didn't. It turns out that the boring explanation seems like the right one: the anomalously high number of people who died of unexplained reasons in 2020 was just the giant global pandemic. Oh well.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#203

Post by xkjkls »

jschwartzi wrote: post #156
maerF0x0 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something to consider if you see anyone trying to downplay this. I admit I'm the morbid one in the group, memento mori and all. But I think the real stat we should track is years of lost life expectancy. That's the only statistic that makes sense when doing cross disease examinations. Not speaking specifically about covid, but more generally, something which primarily kills young people is much bigger deal than som…

YLL is a horrifying metric because it values someone who is 20 over someone who is 60. The only argument I can see for its "usefulness" as a statistic is if you want to imply that the old are less useful than the young. This kind of statement about the bare utility of a human life is the same statement that underlies a lot of how we have treated the disabled or those on welfare in the past. And it only makes sense if…

Someone who is 20 should be valued more than someone who is 60. Case in point, the deaths of the ~100,000 centenarians are going to be way less impactful than a disaster that wipes out the entire town of San Antonio.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#204

Post by commandlinefan »

cronix wrote: post #95
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.

Is "pointing out" data considered downplaying? ~5% of deaths had "covid only" while the remaining 95% had other factors with the average having 4 other factors. From the CDC: > Table 3 shows the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The number of deaths that mention one or more of the conditions indicated is shown for all…

> ~5% of deaths had "covid only" while the remaining 95% had other factors with the average having 4 other factors

Well, I don't even know where to find this kind of data, but your hypothesis could be tested by comparing the number of deaths in 2020 against the number of deaths in 2019, broken down by cause of death.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#205

Post by teachingassist »

timr wrote: post #177
teachingassist wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for now we assume that total COVID-19 deaths equal excess mortality. This seems reasonable, although I'd suggest it's an underestimate of COVID-19 deaths. Excess deaths counts have been consistently showing negative in countries during periods of time where they have coronavirus under control. Other significant causes of death (including suicide, influenza, road traffic accidents) appear to be down. As such, I'd as…

> [Edited to note: the linked article discusses this with further detail and evidence] Here's the sum total of evidence provided: > An analysis by the Netherlands statistical agency suggested that all excess deaths in the Netherlands were directly due to COVID-19 So they use a single study out of Europe to extrapolate here. > The second driver of excess mortality is reduced health care utilization for many causes;3 h…

On the other hand: "in many European countries there was a spike of excess deaths in weeks 31–35 during a period when COVID-19 reported deaths were extremely low. This period coincided with a heat wave and national reports of deaths due to the heat wave. We excluded these weeks of data from subsequent analyses."

I personally wouldn't have excluded these weeks - unless you're going to exclude historical (near-annual) heatwaves from the figures, this should balance out.

> All you can do is throw up your hands and go back to first principles: without prospective validation, statistical models are fiction.

No estimation is perfect, nor expected to be, and so your criticism is unreasonable. You're doing exactly the things that you are criticising the study for, and more so. You provide zero evidence to counter their sourced evidence, and ignore and dismiss points that don't match what you are trying to say.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#206

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

sofixa wrote: post #117
ArkanExplorer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't compare countries like that. People live very differently in Sweden and India; the healthcare system is different, and so is climate, population density and distribution, customs ( e.g. in France people used to kiss on the cheek when meeting, including for the first time), etc. It would make more sense to compare similar countries, and Sweden is drastically worse than any its neighbours. Not only that, they…

Sweden is not drastically worse than Denmark. [1]

[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/TedPetrou/status/1390340398699192....

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#207

Post by nonameiguess »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #59
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. I admit I'm the morbid one in the group, memento mori and all. But I think the real stat we should track is years of lost life expectancy. That's the only statistic that makes sense when doing cross disease examinations. Not speaking specifically about covid, but more generally, something which primarily kills young people is much bigger deal than som…

If you're going to get super utilitarian about it, strict years of life lost is not the best measure. As nearly all of human history proved out, very young children, especially infants, are particularly easy to replace. It's losing people in the prime years that really hurts a society, why for instance the US Civil War and the two World Wars were so terrible, where huge regions lost a majority of 20-40 year old men. Although again, if we're being very utilitarian, men are a lot less valuable than women, which is at least one reason we've usually sent men to war. Childbearing doesn't scale nearly as easily as child seeding.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#208

Post by rsynnott »

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.

If that was the case, you wouldn't expect abnormal excess deaths, though.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#209

Post by einpoklum »

I won't make the unfair comparison to, say, New Zealand, which has no land borders, but let's take Vietnam:

* 100M people

* Long land borders with Laos, Cambodia, and China

* Virus located in state territory in Jan 2020

* Total number of verified cases: 3,137.

* Total number of deaths: 35

* Current number of daily new cases: ~50.

Multiply the figures by 3.3 or so to normalize with US population.

Forget the quibbling over the statistical model. Maybe it's only 600K. Regardless, it's over _20000 times higher_. And even allowing for, I don't know, different susceptibility to the symptoms, or whatever - the US numbers are just insane.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#210

Post by teachingassist »

philwelch wrote: post #198
teachingassist wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people avoiding medical treatment People avoiding medical treatment is awkward in the figures, because - medical treatment sometimes kills people. First link I found suggests that medical treatments cause 800,000 deaths per year in the USA. If medical treatments are really down, I'd guess we might actually expect mortality figures to be temporarily down (but, higher later).

If medical treatment causes more deaths than it prevents on average, we’re probably doing it wrong, though maybe it looks different in the short term as you imply.

Agreed. All medical treatments are about balancing risks.

Whenever you take any surgery (for example), the meaningful risk of immediate death is balanced against the benefit of better quality of life later.

If you measure the impact of medical treatments only on the day they are taken, you'll only find evidence that a bunch of people have died who wouldn't have otherwise died on that day.

You can't then observe the benefit until some time has passed.

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