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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

#301

Post by thebruce87m »

thebruce87m wrote: post #286
notahacker wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not sure why I can’t reply to the person who replied to you - “timr” who is asking for data, but there is data here: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

Cut/paste

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#302

Post by thebruce87m »

timr wrote: post #290
thebruce87m wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why I can’t reply to the person who replied to you - “timr” who is asking for data, but there is data here: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

Not one of those graphs contains annotations on lockdowns, so not one of them provides evidence for the claims you're making. Nobody is disputing that excess deaths are happening, the question is why they're happening.

Cut/paste from the other reply

Again, not sure why I can’t reply directly to timr, but the data in the graphs on EuroMOMO is not spelled out, it’s just data. That’s no reason to dismiss it?

You can start by asking questions like- why do some neighbouring countries have different profiles? Why do some not have any excess mortality? Why do some have multiple spikes?

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#303

Post by newacct583 »

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #293
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…

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.

Sorry, what exactly is the mechanism for those policy deaths you're invoking? Can you cite the relevant study you're thinking of and explain why it's more convincing than people simply dying of a serious disease?

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#304

Post by spekcular »

timr wrote: post #258
WalterBright wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Crude methods are fine. Fantastic models are made with linear regression. No matter how crude your methods, if you don't validate your model prospectively, it is a mathematical fairy tale.

Maybe I'm just ignorant of the relevant statistical methods, but how do you suggest models be validated prospectively? All the model validation techniques I'm aware of come after the model is fit on the data (or a subset of it), like testing against a holdout set, or k-fold cross-validation, or checking R^2.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#305

Post by teachingassist »

thinkingemote wrote: post #292
teachingassist wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you won't find the 'do nothing for herd immunity' as a stategy

Sure, I will. Here's the original Imperial College Report 9 to which I am referring:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...

which discusses 'mitigation' and 'suppression' as two possible strategies, in March 2020.

The UK government took this report as an endorsement for 'mitigation', which it discusses in more detail, even though the report says "For countries able to achieve it, this leaves suppression as the preferred policy option."

Mitigation is quoted as meaning "reducing peak healthcare demand while protecting those most at risk of severe disease from infection" - I'll admit I extrapolated this into "do nothing".

There are then plenty of articles discussing this, e.g.: https://henrytapper.com/2020/04/04/suppression-vs-mitigation...

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#306

Post by username90 »

makomk wrote: post #121
tidydata wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re talking about Figure 5 which is the ratio of total to reported COVID related deaths. This would mean that CA underreported COVID related deaths compared to Florida. Figure 7, the cumulative total death rate, is probably more relevant to the point you’re trying to make, in which case FL and CA are in the same bin. One conclusion you might draw is that the effectiveness of lockdowns cannot be inferred fr…

If California did underreport Covid-related deaths compared to Florida, that in itself would be interesting because endless column inches were spent on claims that Florida was underreporting its Covid deaths as part of a cover-up by its evil right-wing leaders and we definitely didn't see nearly so many claims that California was doing this.

Nobody benefits from bringing it up though, Democrats don't want to look bad and Republicans want to downplay the effects of covid.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#307

Post by fastball »

xkjkls wrote: post #158
fastball wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... exactly the point? Dying with COVID does not mean you would be alive today if you hadn't contracted COVID.

That's what he is attempting to imply is a massive overcounting in the data, but additional conditions that people point out as COVID deaths also having are mostly caused by COVID-19. Oh, they died of viral pneumonia after contracting COVID-19; pretty sure they would be in a different scenario had they not caught COVID-19.

The problem is we don't know, and "both sides" don't seem willing to admit that.

What I can guarantee is that of those 95% who died with COVID, some percentage of them would have died anyway, under almost identical circumstances, except without COVID.

However, it is also true that some of those people would have lived if they hadn't contracted COVID, even though COVID was not the "direct" cause of death. For how much longer, who knows. But certainly not when they did.

In other words: the people saying we should only be counting the 5% direct deaths are wrong, and the people that say we should be counting all 100% who had COVID as deaths from COVID are... also wrong.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#308

Post by Uberphallus »

username90 wrote: post #294
klmadfejno wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Social distancing was never as much about saving people directly as about allowing the healthcare system to handle the mess.

In computer terms, it's about launching processes in a controlled manner vs let them run freely and make the system paginate.

You don't let critical systems paginate.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#309

Post by newacct583 »

fastball wrote: post #137
TameAntelope wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's considered downplaying to try and attribute these people's deaths to something that didn't kill them. If the answer to the question of, "Would this person be alive were it not for COVID?" is "Yes", then COVID killed that person. You should be able to be fragile and still survive, that isn't an excuse to let someone die.

That's... exactly the point? Dying with COVID does not mean you would be alive today if you hadn't contracted COVID.

Exactly! So rather than try to puzzle out this undecidable proposition for nearly a million individual deaths, let's just look at aggregate statistics. Did more people die on the whole during the pandemic than we would normally expect? Does that line up with a model that they probably died from covid?

And... that's exactly what the linked article is doing. And yeah, it turns out that all these people (on balance) would indeed still be alive had they not been sick with covid.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#310

Post by williamsmj »

kaczordon wrote: post #21

Third, we build a statistical model that predicts the weekly ratio of total COVID-19 deaths to reported COVID-19 deaths based on covariates and spatial effects. Given how disastrously wrong most modeling/forecasting(1) has been during this pandemic color me a little bit skeptical that their model is somehow better. Models give wide latitude to fiddle with parameters. (1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7…

This group in particular has a terrible record: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/5/2/21241261/coronav...
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