It looks like Florida is two shades "better" than California in the diagram, which would put the total Florida death rate as better than California. That would be interesting because Florida did almost no lockdown. How could that be?
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Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19
311–320 of 387 posts
Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19
#312Earlier 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…
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.
> Excess deaths could easily be attributed to non-covid factors like Alzheimer’s.
Why would there suddenly be an 100% YoY increase in the number of Alzheimers deaths?
Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19
#313The study is counting all excess mortality during the pandemic. This is a bad methodology, and I might add possibly a politically motivated one, but that's neither here nor there.
There are metrics all over the place showing some regions with no lockdowns having less excess mortality and mortality due to covid. Some of the lockdown measures in some places were counterproductive. Some people say all of them were, some people say none of them were anywhere (which makes no sense really), but the truth is probably somewhere in the middle: at least some measures taken in some places were the wrong call. This is to be expected, we didn't know what the disease was going to do and lots of us panicked. But conflating deaths from covid with deaths from the response and attributing all of them to the same cause is going to necessarily include deaths that would not have happened even in the pandemic if it weren't for the response. And we can quantify that, as an example, look at the disparity in excess mortality and covid death between California and Florida. California had a higher excess mortality and a higher covid death rate. Was that excess death in California due to covid, or due to a botched response? Again, probably a bit of both, but there's no way to pick the two categories apart, and so this entire methodology is not useful to quantify anything.
Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Right, I agree with that. But it was only valid for the first few weeks. The healthcare systems weren't critically overrun anywhere in the world. Yes, from time to time not every patient they wanted to put on a ventilator got one, but ventilators doesn't dramatically improve the odds of survival so it wasn't a big deal anyway.
So why did California continue with their measures for a year? They still did among the worst in the world so those measures seems to have had little to no effect at all.
Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19
#315This is anecdotal at best, but when my grandfather passed last May from COVID, his death certificate did not record the cause of death as COVID. He tested negative twice after his month long bought with it, but only lived for another few weeks until dying of respiratory failure. We were told that because he was not testing positive at the time of death, his cause of death could not be recorded as COVID. I thought cau…
Similar story here - a family member contracted COVID in a nursing home, was sent to the hospital due to low blood oxygen levels, and was discharged. They passed away 2 weeks later, but the cause of death was not listed as COVID. I live in a red state, and for some reason, people are very hesitant to admit COVID can kill.
Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe lockdown is not as effective as people think - not for deaths anyway (I'm sure it keeps case numbers down). For deaths it seems by far the most important is not lockdown, but rather protecting elderly. So maybe Florida prioritized that, and didn't spend effort on lockdown, while California prioritized lockdown thinking it would also help elderly.
Or, maybe California was hit earlier, having a greater share of its total cases relatively early in the pandemic and geographically concentrated, meaning more overwhelmed hospitals and more use of early-pandemic treatment protocols that both overused ventilation based on generic protocols not tuned to COVID’ behavior and lacked more effective treatments developed during the pandemic. (I mean, that definitely happened…
Or, maybe California was hit earlier
Most of California's deaths occurred in a wave from January to March of 2021, while Florida had their first wave in the summer of 2020. (https://linqbymarsh.com/blueicustominsights/covid-insights is good for historical data like this).
There’s a whole lot of omitted confounding variables in the “compare aggregate totals and jump to policy conclusions” games people are playing.
Very true, but the lack of clear correlation between level of restrictions and Covid outcomes is at least some evidence against lockdowns.
Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19
#317It looks like Florida is two shades "better" than California in the diagram, which would put the total Florida death rate as better than California. That would be interesting because Florida did almost no lockdown. How could that be?
One of the people I know who died, did so after traveling to Florida where they did catch covid, return home and died 40 some days later on a ventilator. Maybe travel in and out of Florida is fluid enough to explain it to some degree.
I also know someone who traveled to Florida and died from COVID shortly thereafter.
Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Does India have 20k dead per million?
Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Excess deaths could easily be attributed to non-covid factors like Alzheimer’s. Why would there suddenly be an 100% YoY increase in the number of Alzheimers deaths?
Because we like to ignore facts that counter our worldviews.
Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 muc…
We can use deaths-above-replacement (among other things) to determine how many more people died than normal from all causes, and then whittle down the obviously-not-from-contracting-covid deaths from there. The submission goes into very specific detail about how they did this, and they account for many of the potential confounders related to doing this analysis.
I believe we can be much more precise than you're giving us credit for in determining if contracting COVID was the direct cause of someone's death, even with comorbidities.
To be totally honest, when I see someone say, "we can't ever be totally sure" I nearly wholly discount that opinion, because it's very cheap to proffer, almost always true, and of very little value.