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

#481

Post by thu2111 » Tue, May 18, 2021, 6:27 AM UTC

wunderforce wrote: post #435

thu2111 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as lockdowns go, they work until you end them, at which point you have just delayed the inevitable. Where in the data can you see this? Lockdowns don't appear to work. If they did, then places that didn't use them or cancelled them very early would have had drastically higher numbers than other places that kept them and the curves would be clearly moved around. But that isn't visible in the data. That said, I'…

I think there is some evidence that lockdowns at least offered partial mitigation, but my memory is fuzzy on that. They certainly didn't stop transmission but they may have blunted the rate a bit. I also looked into the mask literature when the pandemic first started and agree there is no evidence to support their effectiveness (unless they are N95s). Even the meta-analysis published by the WHO stated there was no ev…

I think there is some evidence that lockdowns at least offered partial mitigation, but my memory is fuzzy on that.

If you remember, please do post so I can take a look. Because, the evidence I've seen is all completely unambiguous and resolves the question completely in favour of "lockdowns do not work and have no effect". And actually there are now many simple examples of that, of places where restrictions were not applied, or were applied much less strictly, or were lifted, and no differences were observed in outcomes (e.g. Sweden, Florida, Texas, South Dakota, Belarus, Japan etc).

It is entirely possible that everyone wearing masks + distancing + limited contact duration may be "effective".

If that were the case then sudden behavioural changes caused by mask mandates should reliably cause graphs to drop or obviously inflect to a lower growth rate. That should happen everywhere mask mandates come in and are well enforced (which they are, this has been measured). But we don't see that. Of course you can cherry pick a few graphs where there seem to be such inflections, but when you look at lots of them it becomes clear there's no correlation with anything.

I doubt(/hope) no one believes that if I take a healthy and infected person, give them both surgical masks, and lock them in a small room together for a few hours, that the masks will prevent the healthy person from contracting covid.

I see people wearing masks outside all the time, as well as in empty cars. Health 'experts' say nothing about any of this. So, I'm pretty sure lots of people do believe that unfortunately :(

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

#482

Post by pasabagi » Tue, May 18, 2021, 9:44 AM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #480

pasabagi wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 loc…

... The UK lockdown was very strict, but it was also very late. Lockdowns work fine, they just don't work when you call them after everybody already has it.

Strictness and timeliness are unrelated characteristics.

Being afraid to leave your home has, for large parts of the last year, been very reasonable behaviour. The coronavirus has already killed 5 times more people than the blitz. Being an at-risk person in the middle of one of the UK waves was about as dangerous as regularly riding a motorcycle without a helmet.

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

#483

Post by nscalf » Wed, May 19, 2021, 12:42 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #400

nscalf wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist here, but Florida has seemed like a pretty untrustworthy source of info on their covid numbers. There is even an ongoing battle with a data scientist who was fired, according to her, for refusing to fake the covid numbers. Just at a glance, Florida's reported covid numbers seem to be so anomalous compared to the rest of the country, even though when you think of Florida you th…

Please stop spreading misinformation. Rebekah Jones was never asked to falsify any numbers. She is simply a liar. https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-cov...

The information that a former Florida state data science employee was fired and alleges it’s because she refused to falsify data is not misinformation. She may be lying, it the information I stated was 100% true. Also, don’t come at people with far right propaganda networks as your source of knowledge.

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

#484

Post by thu2111 » Wed, May 19, 2021, 9:31 AM UTC

pasabagi wrote: post #482

thu2111 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 loc…

... The UK lockdown was very strict, but it was also very late. Lockdowns work fine, they just don't work when you call them after everybody already has it. Strictness and timeliness are unrelated characteristics. Being afraid to leave your home has, for large parts of the last year, been very reasonable behaviour. The coronavirus has already killed 5 times more people than the blitz. Being an at-risk person in the m…

They don't work regardless of when deployed. The idea the UK was late is doing the rounds inside the UK establishment but it's wrong. If they worked places that stopped doing lockdowns would have seen huge surges and higher death rates than places that kept them, but that didn't happen and there are by now many such examples. Lockdowns don't work because (a) COVID doesn't seem to care about them and (b) COVID is nowhere near deadly enough to justify them, as demonstrated by the counter-example states and countries that rejected them and saw far less than the predicted mortality.

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

#485

Post by pasabagi » Wed, May 19, 2021, 12:06 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #484

pasabagi wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... The UK lockdown was very strict, but it was also very late. Lockdowns work fine, they just don't work when you call them after everybody already has it. Strictness and timeliness are unrelated characteristics. Being afraid to leave your home has, for large parts of the last year, been very reasonable behaviour. The coronavirus has already killed 5 times more people than the blitz. Being an at-risk person in the m…

They don't work regardless of when deployed. The idea the UK was late is doing the rounds inside the UK establishment but it's wrong. If they worked places that stopped doing lockdowns would have seen huge surges and higher death rates than places that kept them, but that didn't happen and there are by now many such examples. Lockdowns don't work because (a) COVID doesn't seem to care about them and (b) COVID is nowh…

> The idea the UK was late is doing the rounds inside the UK establishment but it's wrong.

You seem frankly a bit divorced from reality. If you go to a chart of the daily incidence rate before either the first or the second wave, then mark on it when the lockdowns occurred, it's clearly visible that they occurred too late.

I had to discourage my at-risk mother from going to a choral Christmas concert last year, at a time when they were clocking 40,000 new cases every day and that number was doubling every few days. That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was, and at the time, conservative ministers were still going on TV and talking about a five day christmas.

If you go to the deaths graph, you can see that as a result of this awful mistake, tens of thousands of people died. This is plainly visible in the statistics. Whatever political axe you have to grind is frankly irrelevant, and to be honest, facetious.

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

#486

Post by mikepurvis » Thu, May 20, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

jokethrowaway wrote: post #478

mikepurvis wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Surprisingly not:

"Widespread assumptions that suicide rates would increase during the pandemic are not supported by the growing amount of evidence coming out of Canadian provinces and other jurisdictions around the world, say experts who study the topic."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/suicides-alberta-bc-s...

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

#487

Post by thu2111 » Sat, May 22, 2021, 10:09 AM UTC

pasabagi wrote: post #485

thu2111 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't work regardless of when deployed. The idea the UK was late is doing the rounds inside the UK establishment but it's wrong. If they worked places that stopped doing lockdowns would have seen huge surges and higher death rates than places that kept them, but that didn't happen and there are by now many such examples. Lockdowns don't work because (a) COVID doesn't seem to care about them and (b) COVID is nowh…

> The idea the UK was late is doing the rounds inside the UK establishment but it's wrong. You seem frankly a bit divorced from reality. If you go to a chart of the daily incidence rate before either the first or the second wave, then mark on it when the lockdowns occurred, it's clearly visible that they occurred too late. I had to discourage my at-risk mother from going to a choral Christmas concert last year, at a…

You seem to be trying to identify causation from a single graph. That's not how data analysis needs to be done. You have to compare different datasets that vary in the control variable. In the case of Europe the UK vs Sweden is a good comparison because they are similar in most ways that should affect viral propagation except for lockdowns. Sweden has seen significantly better death rates than the UK, despite the theory saying they should have done much worse, meaning the theory is wrong. Because the theory is wrong you can't derive anything by looking at UK curves in isolation and comparing them to a theoretical counterfactual.

You can also look at the different performance of US states (none) despite very different measures.

That chart is etched into my brain because of how worried I was

In other words you were terrified and forced that fear on your family, based on a mis-understanding of how to use data to draw scientific conclusions. And now you're accusing anyone who points out the truth to you of political axe grinding, although it's you who just threw in a random mention of "conservative ministers" implying their politics is responsible for lots of deaths. That's a political talking point!

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

#488

Post by noxer » Sun, May 23, 2021, 10:43 PM UTC

jmull wrote: post #374

noxer wrote: post #40

The question is how much less death will there be in the years to come. Especially the older people who died earlier because of covid. We should see a decline in death from all kinds of diseases that these people had and would have died from/with.

> …years to come Those years of life are still lost. It’s true they would have died eventually anyway. But that’s true of everyone.

But day/weeks/month/years of life lost is not the same as what we understand if we say lives lost. Also we stooped helping people survives in the name of covid. Life extending treatments and surgery where paused to have resource for dying people. Whos gonna count the days/weeks/months/years these people lost?

In the end everything just shifts number because we all die. I just think this virus mostly hit the people at risk of dying which should have been made it morally easier to let them die, rather than hurt others trying to keep them alive. But that's exactly what the western world did. I would understand it if children where affected. We would morally justify that someone with cancer dies a bit earlier if we can safe the life of someone who still has many years to come.

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

#489

Post by wyager » Wed, May 26, 2021, 12:26 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #479

torstenvl wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wasn’t complaining about getting downvoted - I could not care less about the opinion of the median voting user on this site. I was simply explaining why anyone who disagreed with my straightforward statement of fact was impossibly far off the mark, with citations.

It’s not reasonable that commenters should be prevented from engaging with people who vote on their comment. If anything, this just disincentivizes people from actually explaining why they disagree with something.