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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

#301

I feel like article like this one are commonly used by the anti-vaccine community. They point to those ominous, rising death numbers and understand them as evidence for the dangers of mRNA vaccines. It would therefore (among other reasons) be helpful to understand where exactly that rise in numbers comes from, is it vaccines (which I don't think, else we'd be seeing a similar spike in, say, Europe)? Or is it being ca…

You’re right - I’m anti-vaxx when it comes to mRNA vaccines and I often link to mainstream articles like this:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/analysis-thousands-more-usual-dyi...

Mainstream articles are biased with the spin of the situation but the facts are there. It goes over some causes of deaths - mostly heart/clotting issues, exactly what you’d expect from the vaxx. That’s why we call it the “clot-shot”

In England people who took the vaxx are twice as likely to die as those who don’t:

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adult...

If you want an opposing view of that data read this fact-check:

https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-coronavirus-britai...

Notice how they don’t deny the statistic. They just say it’s taken “out of context” because covid deaths, and vaccines save lives. No matter how they spin it they can’t deny government data says vaccinated 18-59 are much more likely to die. That’s a fact, even though it’s marked as false by Reuters.

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

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also hints that covid-19 related deaths are undercounted in the us.

Or that second order effects from covid prevention policies have led to many extra deaths. e.g. suicides, alcoholism, drug overdose Have to look at the numbers to understand

If you look at the global numbers not all countries had a similar drop in life expentency (ie. Denmark and New Zealand had no drop) but went through similar or more severe lockdown and vaccine policies.

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

#303
post #300
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a significant portion end up losing 7-10 IQ points just from dementia There probably is an IQ drop, but I question this figure. I recall a study doing the rounds here which showed this figure as a ballpark and it was very low quality.

From direct accounts, the figure is likely low. A good attorney friend has a friend who used to be one of the sharpest and most witty attorneys he knew. Months after a "mild case" (no hospitalization), the friend is not all there, fading in and out - he'll literally fade in and make a witty comment almost like before, then seconds later not remember it..., and hasn't been able to get back to work. That sounds like a…

Was that attorney vaxxed?

> I'm not interested in that risk, and you shouldn't be either.

Well, I share your anxiety about it at least. It's my biggest concern about COVID as a young person. Even 2 points is too much given the asymmetric payoff at the margin.

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

#304
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Anchoring like that is a problem when it's used to dismiss something: "Eh, more people die from fentanyl, so X isn't so bad".

Which disregards that X may be a new source of increased deaths, not to mention that when X == COVID, the methods needed to mitigate the risk are antithetical to a mindset of "it's no big deal" because that mindset pushes back against taking even some minimal precuations.

So, anchoring can help people understand the magnitude of something, but at the same time convey a misunderstanding, or short-circuit reasoning as well.

This is precisely why it is a common sales tactic: Go into a jewelry store asking for a nice watch as a present, and you may be shown a $3k watch. Way over your budget, so when you ask to be shown a something else a $700 watch seems like a much better deal, even if it might still be a bit more than you wanted to spend. Maybe the third watch will be an ugly one for $400 to help convince you that you need to spend more, putting both an upper & lower bound on the purchase.

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

#305
post #296

I imagine it has something to do with shuttering society for the better part of two years now. Spouses are known to die within weeks of each other, presumably due to loneliness/lack of will to live/etc. If you force people to stop congregating, stop working out, stop having fun socially, etc... it's kind of the same thing, no? It must have some effect on people's health.

Luckily we don't need too vivid an imagination to find the answer. The data shows that the main cause of higher death rates is covid, not loneliness.

Source?

The article does not have an answer or provide any data.

It only talks about the uptick in deaths not attributed to covid.

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

#306

I feel like article like this one are commonly used by the anti-vaccine community. They point to those ominous, rising death numbers and understand them as evidence for the dangers of mRNA vaccines. It would therefore (among other reasons) be helpful to understand where exactly that rise in numbers comes from, is it vaccines (which I don't think, else we'd be seeing a similar spike in, say, Europe)? Or is it being ca…

The anti-vaccination people don’t need facts, so anything that creates FUD works for them. I live in a protest corridor, and the “freedom lovers” were demanding that we sacrifice the weak and old so that they could enjoy not getting a vaccine. It’s a gross type of mental illness.

The vaccine does not prevent anyone from getting or spreading covid. In Ontario same case rate of covid per 100k residents, in unxxed as vaxxed and heading higher. 3rd graph.

https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data?fbclid=IwAR2pRUq9GN9EEoDTm0...

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The synthetic and highly addictive drug" Funny use of the word 'synthetic' to add extra spookiness. Something like 60% of first-world medicines are natural origin or secondary metabolites of natural origin - the other 40% are all synthetic. [1] [1] https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/br.2017.909

I wondered this myself, since they usually spell out "synthetic opioid" when referring to fentanyl and its ilk, ostensibly to compare it against naturally derived opioids. I have no idea how many in use today are naturally derived; maybe "synthetic" was always a scare term on that context?

The only two opioids naturally found in the poppy that are also used in medicine are codeine and morphine. All others are semi-synthetic (chemical modifications of poppy alkaloids) or fully synthetic. Even most codeine is made by methylating morphine, since the poppy under-produces it relative to medical demand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid#Semisynthetic_and_synth...

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

#308
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...

[deleted]

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

#309
post #282

Mortality rates are basically up in all countries (at least those who can adequately measure it). My bet is that "after Covid" we will see rates under the pre-pandemic value for a couple of years as Covid was most lethal to those that would have died the next 0-5 years anyways without it.

Yes excess mortality it will probably go down in the older groups that died slightly pre-maturely. But the deaths in the 18-64 is not just from Covid-19 but from things exacerbated by it on the society level; Delaying treatment/tests, Drug Overdose, Alcoholism, Depression, Suicide, Traffic Accidents etc. Those are net-new and not necessarily ones that would have happened in the next 5 years.

Don't forget to add in the folks who technically recovered from COVID but are suffering lingering conditions like scarred lung tissue, kidney damage, atrial fibrillation, myocarditis, [...]. Those will add more sad stories over the coming years as those conditions will make recovering from other ailments harder.

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

#310
post #284

This story [1] (NYT paywall) is clearer IMHO: 1. 600,000 more elderly Americans, or 1 of 100, have died during the Covid epidemic than would have died had the epidemic not occurred. 2. 200,000 more non-elderly Americans, or 1 of 1,400, have died—but that's mostly ages 15-64, so more like 1 in 1,000 adults of working age. 3. The CDC says adult death rates were up 20%. [2] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/us/covi…

Worth noting that while there is a clear and measurable increase, the CDC makes a nonetheless significant error by assuming 2019 is the baseline when in fact we see a baseline increase every year even without other factors (both because of increasing population and because of slowing advances in medically extending lifespans).

Population growth is about 0.4% in the US, so that's probably not a big factor. In 2019, the CDC estimated that age-adjusted expected lifespan increased by 1.2% [0].

I think the population growth would indicate a lower death rate than implied by direct counting, since total pop is the denominator. However, I think the increased lifespan would work in the counter direction - Americans should live longer in 2020 than in '19 without C19.

So while the CDC made methodological mistakes, I don't think it would affect the conclusion.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2020/...

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