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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

#341

Post by seppin »

beams_of_light wrote: post #315
Teknoman117 wrote: post #4

This 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.

> and for some reason

We know why. It reflects poorly on the politician they've formed an emotional bond with.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#342

Post by seppin »

nostromo wrote: post #14
Teknoman117 wrote: post #4

This 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…

Medicare pays out 20% more to the hospital if a patient is Covid-19 positive. So there's actually a strong financial incentive to report every possible Covid-19 case in the US.

You are casually implying with no evidence that hospitals are intentionally misclassifying cases for financial reasons (which is a crime).

Please do better.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac...

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#343

Post by digsy »

bsimpson wrote: post #12
Teknoman117 wrote: post #4

This 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…

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.

> 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.

This accusation of fraud and malpractice has been a common talking point amongst those seeking to downplay COVID.

But I've yet to see any evidence that its common or widespread.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#344

Post by digsy »

chmod600 wrote: post #13

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?

A lot of people in Florida ignored the Governors advice and self-locked down. So there's no real way to know what the impact of lockdowns were in Florida.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#345

Post by vkou »

rhino369 wrote: post #338
vkou wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I’m not trying to blame illegal immigrants for our pandemic. They didn’t cause it and I really doubt they made it appreciably worse. Like you said, we didn’t even have restrictions on anyone. But in my hypothetical where we got to where NZ and AZ are right now (no covid in the community), and quarantine controlled entries, uncontrolled border crossings would 1000% bring in new cases. My point is you need to seal your…

> I don’t think it’s fair to say “lockdowns work” when you really mean “lockdowns work at the very start of an outbreak when paired with a strong contract tracing, quarantine, and border sealing.”

Well, I was initially responding to a context-free claim about them not working. I agree, my response was also a bit light on context, and it made a stronger claim than was warranted.

> Total speculation, but I think the US would have had to implement the NZ plan + military on the borders + internal restrictions on travel to different metro areas in Feb. 2020 to have really successfully avoided Covid.

That may be true. It might not be. I think we will never know, because official policy at the time was 'don't test sick people [1], sweep everything under the rug to make the numbers look good, don't let private providers test people, institute a delayed travel ban that does not include Europe.'

[1] Unless they recently traveled from a foreign outbreak area. I remember reading about the hoops people had to jump through to get tested - and how many of them just gave up on the whole thing. Official policy was not to test non-travelers, because there was no evidence of community spread. Of course, if you never test anyone, you won't find any...

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#346

Post by worik »

grumpyautist wrote: post #235
knowaveragejoe wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dismayed to see this kind of conspiracy BS on HN.

What about what I said was "conspiracy bs"? These are the organizations that fund the group. They are invested in vaccine sales, and some of them have very questionable ethics. Again from Wikipedia: "Public-sector workers and academics public health have criticized GAVI, and other global health initiatives (GHIs) with private-sector actors, saying that they have neither the democratic legitimacy nor the capacity to d…

Conspiracy BS because it cherry picks ideas to support a conclusion.

The implied conclusion is that Covid has been exaggerated to sell vaccines

Cherry picking exapmple: "criticized GAVI for focussing on funding expensive new vaccines and neglecting to give children cheap old ones" Two minutes reading the article on Wiki tells me that the purpose of the organisation is to facilitate access to new vaccines, expensive patented ones. Access to non patented cheap vaccines does not need a group like this.

Hardly worth bothering about, but the question was asked. That is why "conspiracy BS"

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#348

Post by grumpyautist »

worik wrote: post #346
grumpyautist wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about what I said was "conspiracy bs"? These are the organizations that fund the group. They are invested in vaccine sales, and some of them have very questionable ethics. Again from Wikipedia: "Public-sector workers and academics public health have criticized GAVI, and other global health initiatives (GHIs) with private-sector actors, saying that they have neither the democratic legitimacy nor the capacity to d…

Conspiracy BS because it cherry picks ideas to support a conclusion. The implied conclusion is that Covid has been exaggerated to sell vaccines Cherry picking exapmple: "criticized GAVI for focussing on funding expensive new vaccines and neglecting to give children cheap old ones" Two minutes reading the article on Wiki tells me that the purpose of the organisation is to facilitate access to new vaccines, expensive p…

So, the study is funded by groups that admit to existing to sell new vaccines? And you don't see a conflict of interest?

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#349

Post by lostlogin »

username90 wrote: post #266
lostlogin wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could make this same argument about anything that causes large amounts of deaths. The cumulative time wasted by humanity each day by putting seatbelts on or by stopping for red lights.

Is very small compared to the lives saved by those measures. Traffic safety laws saves about 20k young people per year in USA. Assume each had 40 years left to live, that is 0.8 million years, or about 0.002 years per person per year. That is about half a day of life saved per year per person, meaning 12 hours. Putting on a seatbelt takes a few seconds and you do it a few times per day, say 20 seconds per day. Add th…

> Is very small compared to the lives saved by those measures

Don’t get me wrong, I wear a seatbelt and stop at lights.

I was just agreeing with the parent comment. There seems a fairly strong vein that wanted no lockdown and for us to just accept any resulting carnage. I’m not part of that group.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#350

Post by tzs »

gen220 wrote: post #215
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…

Our surprisingly-terrible reaction to COVID, due to the reasons cited in this thread, made me think of an (I think) interesting book/show plot. What if there was an epidemic virus, that, within a year +/- a few months of contraction, killed hosts over the age of X (20, 50, 70), regardless of underlying health conditions. It raises some interesting questions! The three I’ve come up with so far: (1) what does a society…

Set X to 30, and make the cause of death deceptive euthanasia, and you've got the movie "Logan's Run" [1]. Make X 21 and you've got the book "Logan's Run" [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run

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