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Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

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Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#221

> Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.” Do we have an actuarial crisis on our hands? We’ve seen the same thing in finance, disaster preparedness and other unrelated industries. We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years. And how does it…

We might. Could be a Black Swan event. Just the same, all along we should have been asking about "collateral damage." We ignored it. That's sadly suspicious.

Obviously, we don't have other pandemics' data to lean on. But we did have the economic crisis circa 2007 - 2008. There was plenty of analysis about the socio-economic impact of that event. That is, for example, poverty rate goes up, so does X, Y and Z.

If we can model a pandemic, can we not also - at least try - to mobel the impact of "the cure" and possible collateral damage?

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#222
post #207

Here's an interesting video about an increase in sports-related deaths and heart-attacks. Maybe it's related? https://rumble.com/vpnxkr-are-these-side-effects-extremely-r...

Sudden cardiac death has always been surprisingly frequent in healthy athletes, so there’s a lot of room for observational bias here. (2016) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4969030/ > A recent estimate of SCD incidence ranged from 1 in 40,000 to 1 in 80,000 athletes per year.

> surprisingly frequent in healthy athletes

More common than in general population?

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#224
post #172

> Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.” Do we have an actuarial crisis on our hands? We’ve seen the same thing in finance, disaster preparedness and other unrelated industries. We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years. And how does it…

Maybe it's similar to the well known "more likely to be hit by a meteorite than to win the lottery" style statements. Obviously that's completely wrong: i've never heard of anyone being hit by a meteorite, but people win the lottery every month. I'm not saying that they're actively lying, but it seems some assumptions in these frequentist's numbers are just not correct.

A lot more people try to win the lottery than jump in front of meteorites.

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#225

Pandemics are defined by "excess deaths" so nothing really surprising here.

Covid is vanishingly unlikely to kill people in this age group. I always find it hard to find a clear number when I Google for a recent IFR, but it’s a fraction of a fraction of a percent.

What is your best guess based on what you've read, and for what age group is that figure for specifically? I have also been googling and have found no good source.

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#226
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> P2P meth For those confused by the P2P acronym as I was, it's apparently a synthesis route that was developed in response to the crackdowns on OTC ephedrine products. It's apparently a lot more pure than the older stuff, at least according to https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/

The Atlantic wrote a really good deep dive piece into the differences recently. Highly recommend reading through it. There are a lot of unknowns about the long term consequences. Anecdotally, people close to me in the mental health industry are really distraught about it. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

Book by the same author here

https://www.amazon.com/Least-Us-Tales-America-Fentanyl/dp/16...

It's a devastating read.

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#227
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the report makes its point poorly and phrases statistics carelessly, but you made a similar mistake: they explicitly state it exceeds COVID deaths over ages 18-45. All these media reports were all influenced by this underlying factsheet from FAF. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S0szR2Ua9v0Sr91YhDD7gPrXsDk... Broadly, it appears true: fentanyl deaths look like they outweigh all those things in the younger pop…

Thanks for linking the factsheet. These deaths are a useless tragedy, and it frustrates me to see them framed against another useless tragedy. The CDC's death count with age breakdowns[1] shows that over twice as many people aged 18-64 died of COVID-19 than drug overdoes, combined across 2020 and 2021. That flips when you limit it to just 18-45, which is the statistic FAF is using. [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/…

> and it frustrates me to see them framed against another useless tragedy.

You know, people need an anchor point for comparison very often.

"Holy shit COVID and car crashes are bad, and among younger adults -- believe it or not-- fentanyl is even worse".

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#228
post #217

I don't know what's going on and I'm scared.

People aren't getting as much exercise, sitting around more eating cheetos and drinking beer, doing more drugs and getting more depressed. I'm not suggesting that all of those are happening to everyone, but each of them is a risk factor and due to the pandemic they're occurring to different segments of the population at the same time.

[deleted]

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I commented on this elsewhere, but I think your point is fair. Many real-world processes follow power laws, but they are modeled as normal distributions. The issue with that is that a power law can "look like" a normal distribution, except it has fat tails, where you get these "once until the heat death of the universe" type events much more frequently.

Black Swan by Nassim Taleb is an entire book about this very common mistake. It's a case where highly-educated people often make errors that laypersons would not.

I think Taleb’s point was more that humans don’t have a good intuition for extreme events, layperson or expert. See the housing crisis during which experts and laypeople were equally fooled. We’re good at understanding eg height of people (small variation) but have no sense of wild scale, eg stock market movements or a huge bank imploding within days.

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#230
post #172

> Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.” Do we have an actuarial crisis on our hands? We’ve seen the same thing in finance, disaster preparedness and other unrelated industries. We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years. And how does it…

Maybe it's similar to the well known "more likely to be hit by a meteorite than to win the lottery" style statements. Obviously that's completely wrong: i've never heard of anyone being hit by a meteorite, but people win the lottery every month. I'm not saying that they're actively lying, but it seems some assumptions in these frequentist's numbers are just not correct.

https://astronomy.com/news/2020/05/death-from-above-7-unluck...

Just last year a woman had just gotten out of bed when a meteorite came through her ceiling and hit her pillow where her head had been.

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