There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic • Hacker News Board

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#471

Post by hervature » Mon, May 17, 2021, 7:02 PM UTC

raydev wrote: post #420

nradov wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education is essential so yes that is a hypothesis we should be testing.

I'm not sure you understand the consequences of an overwhelmed medical system. Regardless, school is being done online. Kids that needed laptops got them.

> Regardless, school is being done online. Kids that needed laptops got them.

Right, I forgot University of Phoenix regularly matches their in-person counterparts in terms of quality. Keep telling yourself that teachers who were never trained to do remote teaching are anywhere near the same effectiveness as before. You ever dissect something virtually? Somethings can simply not be learned through a screen. Physical education, dealing when your crush looks at you in the eye, literally anything "hands-on" like swinging a hammer at a nail, the of useful skills that can only be developed in the presence of another human are tremendous. Funnily, most of the useful things learned at school for most people are not the curriculum and it is these things that are missing.

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#472

Post by natural219 » Mon, May 17, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

raphlinus wrote: post #160

natural219 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still not sure where 0.5% IFR is derived from; the best data I've seen puts it at 0.25% - 0.4%.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v... estimates it at 0.68% (0.53-0.82%). Boiling it down to one number is tricky though, as it is hugely correlated with age, so looking at any particular demographic is likely to give you pretty different numbers.

Just take the aggregate of papers published on those four sites? That's certainly a rather crude methodology :p.

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#473

Post by TheCoelacanth » Mon, May 17, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #167

danenania wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought the main driver of spread was probably not the political football issues like masks in public and businesses being open or closed, but what people are doing behind closed doors with family and friends. Lockdowns don't have much effect on this.

> what people are doing behind closed doors with family and friends. Lockdowns don't have much effect on this. At least here in the UK, lockdown meant not seeing friends or family (unless you lived with them). Was that not the case in the US? Of course if people flout the rules then they won't have any effect.

I think most of the US had much less strict "lockdowns". I think the most restrictive it ever got in my area was that gatherings of 10 or more people were not allowed, and to actually get it enforced, you probably had to go way over 10.

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#474

Post by wernercd » Mon, May 17, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

orblivion wrote: post #206

wernercd wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say "Florida secured their elderly population more quickly and carefully than in New York" misses the fact that New York ACTIVELY put its elderly in harms way by requiring nursing homes take patients. If New York ONLY ignored the problem that'd be one thing... but they actively made decisions that led to a large number of deaths - and more importantly those decisions were AGAINST the CDC guidelines.

Heh, well there you go. I wanted to avoid that point to avoid politics (per the OP's request), but yes. Also I think I heard NY wasn't the only state that did this.

Well, truth be told, I didn't bring up the politics of it.. just the simple truth.

WHY they made the decisions is a rabbit hole... but the facts are simple.

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#475

Post by ryandrake » Mon, May 17, 2021, 8:19 PM UTC

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #473

nicoburns wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what people are doing behind closed doors with family and friends. Lockdowns don't have much effect on this. At least here in the UK, lockdown meant not seeing friends or family (unless you lived with them). Was that not the case in the US? Of course if people flout the rules then they won't have any effect.

I think most of the US had much less strict "lockdowns". I think the most restrictive it ever got in my area was that gatherings of 10 or more people were not allowed, and to actually get it enforced, you probably had to go way over 10.

Also, in the USA there were a lot of things that were on paper "not allowed" but it didn't matter because it wasn't enforced at all. Mask wearing, social distancing, stay-at-home orders, did people actually get cited for violating? I know, at the height of the pandemic, I could easily drive out of my region, eat at a restaurant indoors, gather somewhere unmasked, and there was zero chance I'd be fined. Even for things like mass-gatherings, usually it was just the business owner who got fined, and the 1,000 people caught gathering got off scott free.

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#476

Post by clairity » Mon, May 17, 2021, 8:35 PM UTC

pasabagi wrote: post #465

clairity wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it’s ironic that you use the phrase “overwhelmingly non-skeptical” to negate a totalitarian supposition, when totalitarianism, or more narrowly authoritarianism, requires, and in fact subjugates their populace to being (via propaganda), a docile and unquestioning public. “skeptical yet willing” would be more deserving of credit than “obliviously following”. the public should absolutely question and challenge ‘experts…

Firstly, I don't think skepticism is the inverse of docility, or even necessarily aligned with being questioning. Skepticism is traditionally characterized by an attack on the methods of knowledge-production, and as such, can engender docility and make questioning incoherent. Vaccine skepticism isn't based on a question or challenge towards experts - questions or challenges exist within a specific framework, a specif…

skepticism is an “attack” on certainty, particularly unjustified uncertainty, for which blindly trusting (esp. only government-sanctioned) experts plainly qualifies. only by shedding our false veils of certainty do we inch ever closer to seeing the world as it truly is.

there are a plethora of open questions in vaccine science and epidemiological policy that naturally allow for skepticism. it’s not only political or partisan. you can strip away the political and still be left with plenty valid skepticism.

and yes, skepticism challenges the notion of expertise itself. it suggests humility is undervalued, that an ‘expert’ knows so little against the backdrop of the world’s knowledge (much less the world itself), especially when the ego becomes intertwined with the ideological. experts over time trend toward surety rather than openness and inquiry, especially as stature rises in a field. it’s so common that the out-of-touch know-it-all is a storytelling caricature.

while it’s not always a valid line of attack, questioning the basis of “expertise” can certainly unveil erroneous assumptions, poor methodology/data, and faulty reasoning. the raison d'être of skepticism is to push knowledge forward, not hold it back, and this sort of challenge is just as valid as any other in this regard.

finally, authoritarian governments are hostile toward academic institutions due to concerns over its power and legitimacy as embodied by... skepticism (of the state and its propaganda).

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#477

Post by raydev » Mon, May 17, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

hervature wrote: post #471

raydev wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you understand the consequences of an overwhelmed medical system. Regardless, school is being done online. Kids that needed laptops got them.

> Regardless, school is being done online. Kids that needed laptops got them. Right, I forgot University of Phoenix regularly matches their in-person counterparts in terms of quality. Keep telling yourself that teachers who were never trained to do remote teaching are anywhere near the same effectiveness as before. You ever dissect something virtually? Somethings can simply not be learned through a screen. Physical e…

We can have this discussion if the situation carries on through this year. I agree a lot of places have had suboptimal schooling, some better than others, but I'd rather save lives and hold off on dissecting animals for a year.

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#478

Post by jokethrowaway » Mon, May 17, 2021, 11:07 PM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #96

dabbledash wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why overall excess deaths are a better measure. You really can’t game them.

I think it’s still hard because deaths for almost everything else go down when people aren’t out getting in car crashes, picking the regular flu, etc etc.

Also, locking down everyone (and its economic consequences) probably had / will have an effect on number of suicides (not sure if negative - I can't stand it, I'll kill myself - or positive - I can't stand it but life will be better after covid)

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#479

Post by dang » Tue, May 18, 2021, 4:24 AM UTC

torstenvl wrote: post #225

wyager wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither mortality rate nor vaccine administration rate are uniform. The mortality rate is much lower than 0.5% in e.g. people under 60 years old, and people who are in high-risk groups are mostly already vaccinated. The effective mortality rate today is probably at least an order of magnitude lower, maybe two. Edit: To whoever is downvoting this - you are not only wrong, but hilariously directionally wrong, and in a…

Can someone help me understand why the above, well-sourced post is getting downvoted into oblivion while the nasty one-line response with no supporting citations is getting upvoted?

I have no idea what was going on in this thread earlier, but once the comment veers into complaining about getting downvoted, it's breaking the site guidelines and you needn't look further for an explanation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic

#480

Post by thu2111 » Tue, May 18, 2021, 6:22 AM UTC

pasabagi wrote: post #452

thu2111 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you insane? There are tons of countries that are not totalitarian, with big land borders, that have done far better than the US .... There are obviously thousands of things that could have been differently and or better. The latter part doesn't follow logically from the first. It can be that performance is essentially random, or determined by geographical factors, or by the pre-existing health of the population,…

"I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were a few, there were actually a few coronavirus patients, and I shook hands with everybody, you'll be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands," - Boris Johnson Anybody who thinks the UK represents competent totalitarianism needs to really think about where they are getting their news from. The UK's response was objectively worse than similar countries,…

No it wasn't. I will keep repeating this fact on HN until my fingers fall off - lockdowns do not work. They. Do. Not. Work. The data is in and the data is unambiguous, lockdowns have no effect at all. The UK having worse outcomes than some other regions that had far less strict measures should be enough to kill this idea off completely, yet you cite that very fact even though it clearly disproves the notion that lockdown timing had anything to do with the UK's results.

As for your cited quote, would you like me to cite the thousands of other things government leaders have said over the course of the year that support my point? Yes, the PM is a naturally optimistic guy. None of the people around him are, and they've all been ramping the fear factor to 11 continuously, and in particular they controlled the public messaging not the PM. With the result that there is now a serious problem in the UK with people who are afraid to leave their own homes.