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

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#271

Post by klmadfejno » Fri, May 07, 2021, 8:19 PM UTC

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #50

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.

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…

We would have reacted more assertively because that would have been a much bigger problem. We're lucky it was this way.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#272

Post by vkou » Fri, May 07, 2021, 8:19 PM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #240

vkou wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain China, Vietnam, New Zealand, Australia, and Korea. Not all of those countries are islands (The UK is one, and you may note that it's not on the list.) But all of those countries instituted short, hard lockdowns, and relaxed them after bringing local cases to zero. Around here, we institute half-assed lockdowns, that are lifted when enough people complain about them (only to come back, as cases surge). Maybe t…

Korea didn't have national lockdowns and I don't think China did either. Vietnam's lock-downs were all harsh, but extremely short (2 weeks). The common denominator in all covid success cases seems to be an effective and strong contract tracing and quarantine protocol. That is the tried and true method used to defeat outbreaks. If you have a good contract tracing program, a short-hard lockdown can be used to delay the…

They didn't have national lockdowns, and neither did the US.

They had regional lockdowns early in the pandemic. The US... Had a patchwork of half-assed regional lockdowns, that came weeks late.

> All those countries have tight border controls. We get hundreds of thousands of illegal border crosses ever year. We'd have to deploy the military along the Mexican border and probably Canada too.

The overwhelming majority of border cases in the US did not come from illegal crossings in Mexico. They came from legal crossings through controlled borders, because the US did not implement any quarantine control on inbound travelers. It asked for travelers to self-quarantine as a courtesy, with no verification or enforcement, with predictable results.

It's true that lockdowns without contact tracing just delay the problem. The US has failed at that too. If you caught COVID in April, chances are, you'd have no idea who you caught it from. It would have been difficult to engineer a more spectacular disaster, if we tried.

You need two parts to this equation. Lockdown, and contact tracing. Both are required, and it's disingenuous to say that lockdowns don't work. It's fair to say that they don't work as we implemented them. Our implementation of them is not the only implementation of them.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#273

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 07, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

timr wrote: post #264

lamontcg wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IHME has been wildly wrong yet highly cited for over a year now. I've still got screencaps of their models that predict around 90,000 total deaths in the USA by the end of 2020. They were lifting a sigmoid curve off of China's numbers and applying it to the United States entirely blindly. It didn't even predict the shape of the decline off the first peak correctly since it was implicitly assuming the US would tak…

There has been a ton of terrible modeling this year, and the IHME is just one example. This week the CDC published an ensemble of models trained on Covid case data up to March 27. The models completely mispredict the actual number of cases since that time: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0qZTvVVkAIs484?format=jpg&name=... This is a total failure of validation that would make any other practitioner question the whole exe…

[deleted]

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#274

Post by vkou » Fri, May 07, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

zhaksbs wrote: post #226

vkou wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain China, Vietnam, New Zealand, Australia, and Korea. Not all of those countries are islands (The UK is one, and you may note that it's not on the list.) But all of those countries instituted short, hard lockdowns, and relaxed them after bringing local cases to zero. Around here, we institute half-assed lockdowns, that are lifted when enough people complain about them (only to come back, as cases surge). Maybe t…

China literally welded people in their homes. They probably lied about their numbers. New Zeland, and Australia had few cases when they did lock down, and are islands. Korea has a very disciplined population compared to the West. Really you should be comparing the US to Europe. The EU didnt do much better, but was far more draconian. Or within the states. But anyway, i never know if people are serious when they propo…

> But anyway, i never know if people are serious when they propose the China or Australian model. Those were brutal and Im glad to be voting for a constitutional amendment next week to limit the governor's lockdown authority.

I never know if people are serious when they suggest that a few hundred thousand dead is a worthwhile footgun-sacrifice to escape the draconian rule to which Australians and New Zealanders were subjected to over the past year. I'm generally a bit leery of ideological arguments that necessitate sacrificing those numbers of people for some intangible, abstract good.

But if we are going to go down that road, can I get a say in which people we will get to sacrifice to meet that ideological objective?

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#275

Post by timr » Fri, May 07, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #229

grecy wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are lots of other plausible alternative hypotheses. Please list them. We have data about deaths going back many decades. It's very safe to say that if in 2010 you made a prediction about the number of expected deaths in 2011, you would have been very close to the real number. Same if you had predicted the deaths for 2019 in 2018. Suddenly, after decades and decades of being almost perfect in your predictions,…

And that's the very beginning. We also have plenty of time series data from effectively instituted lockdowns worldwide. Excess deaths rise prior to the lockdown, in line with but greater than reported COVID deaths. They continue rising until median COVID- time-to-death days after the start of lockdown. Then they fall, sharply, dipping below regular excess deaths (and tracking the fall in COVID deaths). That isn't a p…

Your claims of "vast time series data" would be more believable if you actually linked to some of it.

It's interesting how you can't suspend your credulity to encompass the idea that there are alternative hypotheses for excess deaths, but you are more than happy to assert the existence of "vast datasets" to defend your own opinions.

Here are a few plausible alternative hypotheses that actually have substantial backing evidence, which can be obtained with trivial googling:

* Excess deaths due to missed treatments (we know this is happening, e.g. for cancer)

* Excess deaths due to untreated acute medical emergencies (e.g. physicians in NYC noticed the curious phenomenon of heart attacks disappearing from ERs during the height of lockdown

* Excess deaths due to drug and alcohol abuse (again, we know it's happening)

I'm sure there are many others worth consideration. My point is not to assert that any of these are automatically true, but that they merit consideration, and anyone who doesn't fairly consider them is probably not engaged in good-faith debate.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#276

Post by orangecat » Fri, May 07, 2021, 8:22 PM UTC

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…

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.

It's not about "usefulness", it's that saving the life of a young person produces a larger benefit in terms of expected future years of life. Take the extreme case: if a building is on fire and you can only rescue one person, would you be indifferent between saving the life of a 10 year old child versus a 90 year old with terminal cancer?

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#277

Post by mypalmike » Fri, May 07, 2021, 8:22 PM UTC

exporectomy wrote: post #144

mypalmike wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparison of expected versus actual outcomes is a reliable method to estimate the overall effect of a new input. Can you specifically point out how such analysis constitutes "shenanigans"?

It includes deaths caused by the response to covid, such as people avoiding hospital for other diseases and whatever the deathy consequences of lockdowns might be.

Of course. This is addressed in the article.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#278

Post by klmadfejno » Fri, May 07, 2021, 8:23 PM UTC

username90 wrote: post #191

whimsicalism wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the number of years lost with social distancing. You could make this same argument about anything that causes large amounts of deaths.

Places that didn't do social distancing didn't lose much more, there is no evidence that social distancing saved more than I estimated here. My estimate was even very generous in your favour since I estimated death without social distancing to be the worst in the world. But we could estimate to be roughly the death rate in Florida, in which case most of the social distancing did basically nothing.

I think that's a risky assumption. It's plausible that even in no-social-distance areas, the most vulnerable people socially distanced anyway.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#279

Post by pbreit » Fri, May 07, 2021, 8:23 PM UTC

teachingassist wrote: post #127

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…

> 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…

Excess deaths could easily be attributed to non-covid factors like Alzheimer’s.

Suggesting the US had 900k covid deaths is ridiculous. Only 1 of the 6 considered factors lists covid as a direct cause.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#280

Post by thebruce87m » Fri, May 07, 2021, 8:25 PM UTC

Sebb767 wrote: post #114

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…

> for now we assume that total COVID-19 deaths equal excess mortality. This part is especially doubtful for me, as there are factors moving it in either direction. For one, the pandemic measures also helped a lot for things like the flu, which had less cases and therefore caused less deaths. On the other hand, problems caused by lack of exercise and social interaction have definitely increased. Lastly, I'm quite sure…

For my country and some others I monitored, the first wave happened outside of flu season, and excess mortality was higher than COVID deaths at that point and continued to track.

Second wave was more difficult since it overlapped the normal flu season.

You can see graphs here showing normal flu seasons and where COVID fits in: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/