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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

#241

Post by xkjkls »

hervature wrote: post #230
xkjkls wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think one side is using infinity. The issue here is that lockdowns, if done effectively, don't have to last for a full year. Look at Australia. Look at New Zealand. They managed to lock down for substantially less than a year, get the disease under control, and resume life mostly as normal. The US was not, but that also needs to be included in the tradeoff. It wasn't obvious that applying enough pressure woul…

I don't know how people compare two isolated islands that are multi hour flights to any other nation to the USA with a straight face. Think of the backlash at even proposing locking the Mexico border. Also, Australia and New Zealand just broke their travel bubble, I don't know if that still constitutes as a "short lockdown" if you haven't been allowed to leave your country the entire time. > It wasn't obvious that ap…

> I don't know how people compare two isolated islands that are multi hour flights to any other nation to the USA with a straight face. Think of the backlash at even proposing locking the Mexico border.

Very little of our COVID infections have been linked to either of the geographic borders in this country. While I understand there are greater risks with those borders, it doesn't make the situation incomparable.

> Also, Australia and New Zealand just broke their travel bubble, I don't know if that still constitutes as a "short lockdown" if you haven't been allowed to leave your country the entire time.

Bars and restaurants and sports have been available the whole time. Even if there wasn't a travel ban from the country, where would people even go? Most other countries aren't allowing visitors.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#242

Post by JshWright »

maxfurman wrote: post #178
whimsicalism wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would generally expect non-covid deaths to be down as is indicated by correlations between mortality and economic decline, the fact that suicides haven't trended substantially upwards, and the fact that cars are off the road.

I saw an article to the effect that car-related deaths are up because, since there are fewer cars on the road, the drivers who are left drive faster and/or more recklessly and get in more accidents. So, as with everything in this pandemic, it's complicated...

Traffic deaths were up very slightly in 2021. Not enough to move the needle on all-cause mortality.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#243

Post by whimsicalism »

hervature wrote: post #132
whimsicalism wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Numerous problems. 1. The current death toll is with the existing lockdowns. There are good reasons to think that without (especially the early) lockdowns the death toll could have been way higher. 2. Being dead for 1 year cannot be equivalently compared to being socially distant for 1 year (not 2). Is that not obvious? 3. This is before we get into life long disability, etc. due to covid. I know someone whose parent…

Correct, all valid points. But we can assign numbers to all these things and the error bars are sufficiently large that there is ample room for debate. As for 2. is it obvious? My niece doesn't know that there are other humans like her, I would gladly take a year at the end of my life to give that gift to her. Given the current vaccination rates, many people will not see normal until 2022. For 3. it cuts both ways, h…

Important to keep in mind about the YLL numbers I cited: most of the YLL comes from younger people who died early, even though most of the deaths are among people 70+.

So if you are going by this "differential quality of different years" argument, you have to account for the fact that most of these years actually aren't for really old people.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#244

Post by [deleted] »

timr wrote: post #89
altcognito wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are making an assumption that all (or even just the majority) of excess deaths are because of this. 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 theoretic…

[deleted]

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#245

Post by username90 »

standardUser wrote: post #171
dadjoker wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And know that...how? Because "correlation = causation" is a legitimate scientific hypothesis now? Any legitimate scientific study has things like control groups to verify that the studied action wouldn't have happened otherwise, something I learned if high school biology in the first week. Your statement has none of that. And, any time you do look at places with NPIs vs non NPIs (Jutland in Denmark, or compare FL and…

If hospitals are full, not all people who need care can get care. It's not a complicated concept. ICUs in many parts of the country hit capacity during the pandemic, and that was with radical efforts to limit the spread of the virus.

Ventilators weren't as needed as originally thought. USA even killed a lot of patients by being over eager putting them into ventilators. If you put a healthy person in a ventilator there are a few percent chance of giving them pneumonia which typically kills them. When you blast air into their lungs it is really easy to accidentally blast bacteria all over them as well.

The articles about "we now know better how to treat patients" was mostly this, don't put them on ventilators unless it gets super critical, most patients got better without one. Also I haven't seen data on this but I strongly suspect the main reason USA lost so many young people to covid compared to other countries is that USA is way more eager to put people on treatment like ventilators, basically blasting bacteria into the lungs of young otherwise mostly healthy people killing them. Those young lives would have been saved if they weren't diagnosed in the first place.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#246

Post by whimsicalism »

nostromo wrote: post #133
UncleOxidant wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or the entire population losing 1 year Except we didn't lose a year. A lot of us actually kind of liked the last year. Many got to work from home and discovered it was a lot less stressful than commuting into an office every day, for example. I have a feeling that some of us are going to recall the last year with a bit of nostalgia in the future.

All available data is showing that this past year has been detrimental to poor students. Imagine trying to learn on an old phone, using a cellular internet connection in a bedroom you share with your sister. So, while I'm glad you enjoyed your year at home -- the focus here was on the impact on students.

In my urban school district, areas with the largest concentration of poor students are the ones that most strongly support continued distance learning. Affluent + white families are the ones most opposed.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#247

Post by WalterBright »

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…

> without prospective validation, statistical models are fiction.

I wouldn't be completely dismissive. The first attempts at using statistical data to drive medical practice were during the Napoleonic wars, and dramatically improved medicine. I would expect the statistical methods used were pretty crude, as it was a very young discipline.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#248

Post by whimsicalism »

maxfurman wrote: post #178
whimsicalism wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would generally expect non-covid deaths to be down as is indicated by correlations between mortality and economic decline, the fact that suicides haven't trended substantially upwards, and the fact that cars are off the road.

I saw an article to the effect that car-related deaths are up because, since there are fewer cars on the road, the drivers who are left drive faster and/or more recklessly and get in more accidents. So, as with everything in this pandemic, it's complicated...

Interesting. So scratch the bit about cars.

Doesn't honestly surprise me that much , I was driving up i95 in late March and people were pulling some really crazy shit in the early pandemic. I also saw a few (looked deadly to me) wrecks on the highway.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#249

Post by throwkeep »

bdibs wrote: post #157
throwkeep wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another financial incentive that exists: Families can get up to $9,000 for funeral expenses if the cause of death is listed as Covid. https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/covid-funeral-reimburs...

Why would that incentivize the hospital though? Isn’t that who determines cause of death?

Not necessarily the hospital itself, but with that kind of incentive it's going to find its way in. One possibility is family members applying pressure to compassionate doctors.

“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome” - Charlie Munger

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#250

Post by JshWright »

teachingassist wrote: post #173
philwelch wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some more factors might be hospital crowding early in the pandemic, people avoiding medical treatment, and increased homicide rates.

> 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).

> irst link I found suggests that medical treatments cause 800,000 deaths per year in the USA.

That number pops up all the time in clickbait headlines, but the study behind it doesn't really support the claim.

There is a pretty substantial difference between "Deaths caused by medical mistakes" and "Deaths that occur in a certain timeframe after a medical mistake occurs" (which is what the study actually looked at) are two very different things.

The sicker someone is, the more likely they are to receive healthcare (so there are more opportunities for mistakes). Also, the sicker someone is, the more likely they are to die. Those two combine to result in a lot of folks that die shortly after a medical mistake, even if the mistake was very minor, and didn't contribute in any way to their death.

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