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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

#481
post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many Covid-related? How many drug overdoses? How many suicides?

This seems like what-about-ism. You could look these numbers up easily on the CDCs death data, and then you could formulate a coherent thought. Instead, it seems like you're just trying to derail the conversation with as little effort as possible.

No, it’s not what-about-ism. It’s a suggestion that the two numbers being thrown around are accompanied by some bare minimum of detail to have a meaningful conversation.

OP made the link to Covid-19, which seems very plausible, but it’s not clear if they have facts to support this or it’s just a guess. Suicides and overdoses are two of the leading causes of death among young Americans. It’s irresponsible to discuss a 40% increase in deaths and imply this is all Covid-19 without any evidence.

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

#484
post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you're conflating arguments, though. I've never heard the "no big deal" one. I've heard another: If responses to COVID have worsened the opioid crisis, that's a cost that should be counted against COVID mitigation measures. (I still think this is faulty: I don't think responses to COVID have done much to change the opioid crisis. But at least this is a rational argument and open to debate).

Different social/family circles maybe? (And my own-- not always healthy-- habit of reading comments on political news site... I've mostly backed away from that for my own mental sanity) But I've seen the "no big deal" thing a fair bit. I remember one exchange nearly verbatim "Fentanyl kills more people but all the fearmongering media wants to talk about is a virus that gives you a cold". Heck, at the very beginning p…

> but with the (possible) decrease in severe cases with Omicron I've seen hints of this argument again.

Well, at some point, it's a reasonable argument. Risk isn't going to go to 0. It looks like with vaccination my personal risk is 2-3x influenza, but I may be overstating it.

At some point, we're going to just have to give up and assume risks. I'm not routinely wearing masks 3 years from now.

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

#485
post #397
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The increase in deaths is being driven by lockdown/social isolation so it looks more like medical triage. This is an argument many make, but it's not a really good argument. - Fentanyl deaths were trending up before 2020. - The degree to which fentanyl is lacing other street drugs is unprecedented and seemingly independent of lockdown. - Look, we don't really have "lockdown" anymore.

>- Fentanyl deaths were trending up before 2020. They were trending up but there was a very sharp increase once the epidemic started. >- The degree to which fentanyl is lacing other street drugs is unprecedented and seemingly independent of lockdown. There was precedent before 2019. Seemingly independent growth that's also parabolic during 2020? Unlikely >- Look, we don't really have "lockdown" anymore. The genie is…

>They were trending up but there was a very sharp increase once the epidemic started.

Visualizing the trend, the cause is debatable: extrapolating from the trend that was in place as of March 2020 [0] leads to a similar place we're at now, and we can't know if that would otherwise have levelled off. There was a sharper uptick in April/May, but not a significant variation from the smoother curve that would have fit previous data.

>The genie is out of the bottle once people relapse.

You would still expect there to be a noticeable decline: Fewer people starting down the addiction pipeline to begin with, more people that are already addicts starting to get the help they need again. There should be a noticeable decline as people reconnect to support services, and we haven't seen that yet. Maybe it's just too early to tell, but social awareness of the opioid crisis was at an all-time high in 2019/early-2020, Rx access to them was already severely limited for the previous few years, and in mid-2019 a trend that had been pretty flat for ~2 years started to significantly increase. I'm sure COVID didn't help, but there was significant upwards pressure before that and disentangling the two is not a straightforward task.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm

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

#487
post #464

Many people kept insisting "Not many young people are dying from Covid-19" a statement that over looked the fact that, under normal circumstances, not many young people die at all. But there was an article in the New York Times that offered these facts about people aged 20 to 40. July, 2019: 11,000 dead July, 2020: 16,000 dead Both numbers are small in a country where 3 million people die each year, about 250,000 a m…

How many Covid-related? How many drug overdoses? How many suicides?

I looked up the information in a previous thread. For the United States, using the most conservative Covid numbers, they outweighs these by at least a factor of 5.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29706964

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

#488

> "The CDC weekly death counts, which reflect the information on death certificates and so have a lag of up to eight weeks or longer, show that for the week ending Nov. 6, there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319." So last year more covid deaths (particularly among the elderly), but while those numbers have de…

No post body was provided.

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

#489
post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like what-about-ism. You could look these numbers up easily on the CDCs death data, and then you could formulate a coherent thought. Instead, it seems like you're just trying to derail the conversation with as little effort as possible.

No, it’s not what-about-ism. It’s a suggestion that the two numbers being thrown around are accompanied by some bare minimum of detail to have a meaningful conversation. OP made the link to Covid-19, which seems very plausible, but it’s not clear if they have facts to support this or it’s just a guess. Suicides and overdoses are two of the leading causes of death among young Americans. It’s irresponsible to discuss a…

[deleted]

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

#490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link(s)?

Quoted post unavailable.

This isn't some everyday funeral home director - this fellow had previously been in the alt-news (https://fullfact.org/health/funeral-director-interview/), with baseless claims like facemasks causing pneumonia or that all the people who died in care homes were euthanized using midazolam or that the covid vaccines were never tested (at all) before deployment. I would not consider him an authoritative or unbiased source.
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