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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

#311
post #283

My uncle was outside that age group but died last summer of a heart attack —- due to Covid. All the ICU beds in his area were occupied by Covid patients.

I’m so sorry. My father-in-law has had his “elective” surgery to deal with a hernia cancelled twice due to hospital overcapacity, and all we can do is pray that Germany’s current restrictions will have kept the numbers low enough for his current appointment this week and likely follow up procedure to deal with tachycardia to happen.

They’re not even talking about rescheduling the hernia surgery anytime soon - he’s making do with a compression band.

This is why it is other people’s business whether someone is vaccinated.

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

#312
post #75

“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.” This sounds very strange indeed, I'd like to see the numbers. For instance Euromomo https://www.euromomo.eu collects the statistics about death rates, here is a plot for the Italian death rate and you can see the mortality spikes with the covid wa…

> It sounds very strange that the death spike is "over" 3 sigma, which should mean over 3 standard deviations, which is really unbelievable, to me this looks like an artefact of some sort It's not an artifact, it's incorrect modeling. If they're talking about sigmas, then they're modeling deaths as being normally distributed. But deaths aren't normally distributed, as you can tell by glancing at a graph of deaths ove…

Overall death rates are highly affected by age distribution in the population - the proportion of 80-100 year olds in your population in a given year is going to have a big impact on the death rate that year.

Death rates for an age range (like 18-45) are likely to be much more stable.

Also, pretty dubious about that specific dataset - it looks like it includes linear interpolations between a much smaller set of actual datapoints, so not sure you can use it to infer the actual distribution of death rate statistics

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

#313
If they are comparing deaths in 2020 when everyone except "essential workers" was stuck at home for 3/4 of the year, to 2021 when many more people were back to their routine of driving, work, recreation, etc. I would not be surprised to see a spike in deaths for young people who are back into doing a lot more things that can cause accidents.

If they are comparing 2021 to something like a 10 year average death rate and seeing a 40% jump, then that is more interesting.

Also raw numbers matter. Two deaths from some rare cause this year vs. one last year is a 100% increase, but doesn't really mean anything in a state with 6.5 million people.

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

#314
post #283

My uncle was outside that age group but died last summer of a heart attack —- due to Covid. All the ICU beds in his area were occupied by Covid patients.

I’m so sorry. My father-in-law has had his “elective” surgery to deal with a hernia cancelled twice due to hospital overcapacity, and all we can do is pray that Germany’s current restrictions will have kept the numbers low enough for his current appointment this week and likely follow up procedure to deal with tachycardia to happen. They’re not even talking about rescheduling the hernia surgery anytime soon - he’s ma…

I assume your opinion is "more vaccinated people => less load on hospitals", but this article hints it could be the opposite.

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It could also hint that excess deaths from lockdown policies are higher than expected. COVID deaths are almost certainly undercounted by some factor, but suicides and drug overdoses are skyrocketing. These numbers would make sense if the cure is worse than the disease too.

Assuming that all covid deaths are accounted for and all the rest of the excess deaths are from lockdown, there would have to be at least as many excess deaths as covid deaths to start saying the cure is worse than the disease. From the numbers it seems like there would be about 800k covid deaths to 200k excess (in the USA), so that would indicate the disease was 4x worse than the cure. Of course those are all assumptions that I don’t think are accurate, but using your own logic.

But one thing we probably can agree on is that at this point covid is endemic and most people have given up trying to get to zero cases.

For me, I personally just integrated into my worldview the fact that I can’t trust most humans to give a shit about others (like following simple mask and vaccine guidelines) and have to protect my family however best I can, even if that means less social interaction for the rest of my life.

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

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Within my brothers circle of friends / former friends etc, amongst those that participate in recreational drug use, there have been a crazy number of Fentanyl related deaths. They're all between the ages of 25 - 30. I can't help but wonder how much this has an impact.

Correct! “ The synthetic and highly addictive drug has claimed more lives than COVID-19, auto crashes, gun violence, cancer and suicide in the year 2020.” https://www.abc12.com/news/fentanyl-number-one-cause-of-deat...

Not to be unkind, but a local TV station as a primary source for such a sweeping conclusion on a very complex issue is, well, basically worthless.

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Working from home can remove a lot of the accountability that keeps addicts in check. This is a cruel twist, given that suicide deaths actually decreased in 2020[1], probably for the reason you've mentioned: spending nearly all of your time with others makes you accountable and removes opportunities for self-harm. [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR016.pdf

I’m not a native speaker, but there seems to be something inappropriately judgmental about the wording of “keeping in check”. Loneliness is hard for many and causes suffering, and drugs are sometimes used to try to manage suffering. More use is linked to more accidents.

It's not judgemental - it just is. Many addicts in recovery themselves use similar language. I spend a lot of time with recovering addicts and alcoholics and accountability is an important component of treatment.

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

#318
post #283

My uncle was outside that age group but died last summer of a heart attack —- due to Covid. All the ICU beds in his area were occupied by Covid patients.

I’m so sorry. My father-in-law has had his “elective” surgery to deal with a hernia cancelled twice due to hospital overcapacity, and all we can do is pray that Germany’s current restrictions will have kept the numbers low enough for his current appointment this week and likely follow up procedure to deal with tachycardia to happen. They’re not even talking about rescheduling the hernia surgery anytime soon - he’s ma…

I don’t disagree but I think we should also be demanding more capacity from our hospitals and maybe just maybe demanding actual universal healthcare. It’s so bizarre to me that that’s not even on the table but it’s because most just assume we have to have a for-profit medical system.

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

#319

Life Expectancy in U.S. Declined 1.8 Years in 2020, CDC Says https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/life-expectancy-in-u-s-decl... This is for 2020 - COVID-19 deaths are more for 2021. Really wild numbers if you think about it.

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

Missouri coroners proudly admit they aren’t counting any COVID deaths. It’s definitely being undercounted. I know someone who died in Wisconsin but the hospital said he didn’t have COVID then a year later they admitted they’d done the test wrong and actually didn’t know. None of the data provided is reliable. More people should be worried about how unreliable our healthcare system.

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

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> See the housing crisis during which experts and laypeople were equally fooled. Not discounting your main point, but there were plenty of experts and laypeople that were completely unsurprised by the housing crisis. If anything, I think the housing crisis was more of a case that so many people had a vested interest in thinking/pretending the music would never stop.

Totally, I’ll claim to have been very pessimistic before it happened. Referenced the likely downturn in an economics assignment that didn’t impress my very optimistic lecturer. I missed the bottom though, was convinced we were going down a lot further. Don’t fight the Fed, I guess.
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