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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

#291

Post by philosopher1234 »

klmadfejno wrote: post #271
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You give us too much credit. Hold the size of the problem constant and spread the effects to more demographics. I guarantee there would have been a bigger response. We’re not that rational.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#292

Post by thinkingemote »

teachingassist wrote: post #289
dadjoker wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Color me completely distrusting. Between the IHME and Neil Ferguson (aka The Master of Disaster because of how horrifically wrong his models have been) models in the UK, they haven't even been close to reality. The IHME was even called out last year by other data modelers at one point for how poorly done their models were.

This is a slight re-write of history, by my recollection. Neil Ferguson's earliest models were used to justify no action/herd immunity as the UK's initial strategy. I recall (but can't find) the Imperial College scientists saying they didn't fully consider any other option at first, because they understood that it would be politically unpalatable.

Just goes to show how faulty our recollection is that it changes what we think was history.

Best to actually look it up.

(hint: you won't find the 'do nothing for herd immunity' as a stategy, but you will find many newspaper articles speculating about it based on out of context quotes)

History gives a better record than our impressions from the news of the sensational at the time and our faulty memories.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#293

Post by ErikVandeWater »

newacct583 wrote: post #100
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…

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…

You have deaths due to Covid directly, additonal deaths that come as a result of good policies, and additional deaths that come as a result of bad policies.

It's disengenuous to say Covid is the cause if politicians used hamfisted responses that led to more deaths than necessary.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#294

Post by username90 »

klmadfejno wrote: post #278
username90 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, and that was enough. Forcing kids and people under 60 to stay home and social distance didn't seem to be necessary to avoid disaster. But California still did it for over a year, that is the price you paid. How many years of life did it save in California compared to letting people distance as they themselves deem necessary? Not that many.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#295

Post by betwixthewires »

pelasaco wrote: post #101
hervature wrote: post #65

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…

Isn't "total mortality due to COVID-19" different than "total mortality from COVID-19"? As I understand the cancer treatments were aborted due COVID-19, therefore, more person died due to COVID-19 but not necessarily from COVID-19... does it make sense?

Well that's a question of if you think the lockdowns were necessary or not. If you think they were, then of course excess mortality is due to covid. If you think they weren't then that excess mortality was due to unneeded human intervention. Of course the answer is somewhere in between, that is, some degree of lockdowns and therefore the deaths attendant to that were overzealous, and that throws this entire model in the trash.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#296

Post by ErikVandeWater »

throwkeep wrote: post #249
bdibs wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Fantastic quote!

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#297

Post by makomk »

xkjkls wrote: post #241
hervature wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. > Al…

I'm not sure how easy it'd be to link Covid infections to the Mexican border - they were having serious trouble even reporting accurate Covid death numbers, never mind anything more useful: https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-mexico-underreported-cor... The Covid outbreak there was really bad and would no doubt have screwed the US if something else hadn't earlier. Though it does look like the immediate source of US infections was an unfortunately large amount of travel from a global epicenter of infections which was somehow reporting zero cases at the time. (Something went really wrong in Italy, and the English-language media has completely failed to examine what happened there - probably because their leader is a boring technocrat these days.)

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#298

Post by betwixthewires »

mywittyname wrote: post #91
bsimpson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's pretty difficult to prove covid was not a contributing factor to a person's death. So unless there's clear evidence it wasn't, it should be listed as a contributing factor. This isn't really any different than when a person dies some immediate event while also suffering from an underlying illness. If a leukemia patent suffers a an aneurysm, one would expect leukemia to be present on their death certificate.

"It is pretty difficult to prove god does not exist, so unless there's clear evidence he doesn't, it should be assumed he does."

The answer is the opposite, actually: if it is difficult to disprove any single contributor one way or another it should not be listed as a contributing factor.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#299

Post by jcims »

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?

Lady calls in, her 450lb 57 year old son with uncontrolled type 2 diabetes and COPD is found dead at his home. Post-mortem test shows he's positive for COVID. You're the doctor, your hospital has had to furlough a quarter of their staff because nobody is coming in for any outpatient care, there's an ICU full of people on vents and you've been there for 18 hours already.

The guys mom is there and you're working up her son's case. You have to fill in the blank for cause of death. What are you going to do? Order an autopsy and possibly cut this family out of government aid for COVID-related expenses and deaths?

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#300

Post by philosopher1234 »

username90 wrote: post #188
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to be making the assumption that disease spread would not be different had lockdown not happened. The question isn't cost of lockdown vs cost of disease with lockdown, it's cost of lockdown vs cost of disease without lockdown. Without a lockdown, April and May would probably have had 10x (at least) more cases, and way more than 10x more deaths because hospitals wouldn't have had the space to hold everyone…

No country in the world is even close to an order of magnitude worse than USA regardless of what they did, so it isn't a reasonable estimate. Worst case is less than about 2x USA's numbers, I used that as an estimate of how many lives you saved with your measures.

India?
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