Live data from Hacker News

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

thecentersquare.com

531–540 of 600 posts

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

#531
post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hospitals build out capacity based on projections of need. So they look at the population of their catchment area, other hospitals, demographics of the locals, and calculate that they’ll need about X icu beds / maternity rooms etc etc and then build in a small overcapacity for surges. If they routinely overbuilt then cost would go up even more. I think this approach is reasonable for any business,* whether private or…

>I think this approach is reasonable for any business

It's reasonable for business, but not reasonable for society (because healthcare should be more risk adverse than a business). That's why the hospital system for op of this thread, which is German, isn't a business, and why they get to complain about how it's deployed

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

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And 2) 2020 and 2021 have very large Covid-surge-shaped excess death bumps that imply an incredibly strong correlation between Covid and the deviation in deaths from “normal” years. It would be more accurate to say "COVID-19 impacted years" than "incredibly strong correlation between Covid". A lot of government and public policy changes were quickly made during these times. Are you willing to say with complete certa…

I think you’ll see that I very explicitly said I am not willing to definitively say those things, but that I am highly skeptical that those types of effects would be so responsive to the changes in number of Covid cases. Does it in any way make sense to you that Covid cases falling by X% in a given week would directly cause an immediate corresponding drop in depression, drug overdose, or prescription drug supply chai…

> It did however cause an immediate corresponding decline in excess deaths, regardless of assigning any cause.

Did it, though? We see deaths increase in August/September during the Delta wave, but we don’t see them decline when Covid cases fell drastically earlier in the summer: https://imgur.com/a/b4Pobrh

That suggests 25-44 year olds may be experiencing an elevated death rate that persists even when Covid cases were low.

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

#533
post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’ll see that I very explicitly said I am not willing to definitively say those things, but that I am highly skeptical that those types of effects would be so responsive to the changes in number of Covid cases. Does it in any way make sense to you that Covid cases falling by X% in a given week would directly cause an immediate corresponding drop in depression, drug overdose, or prescription drug supply chai…

> It did however cause an immediate corresponding decline in excess deaths, regardless of assigning any cause. Did it, though? We see deaths increase in August/September during the Delta wave, but we don’t see them decline when Covid cases fell drastically earlier in the summer: https://imgur.com/a/b4Pobrh That suggests 25-44 year olds may be experiencing an elevated death rate that persists even when Covid cases wer…

I’ll need to rerun my graphs. I haven’t done them since mid summer but at the time if you overlaid the Covid rise and fall on the excess deaths rise and fall it was uncanny how well they matched. The falling side of delta may have been different.

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

#535
post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking someone to look up some numbers for you to complete your random hypothesis isn't exactly constructive either way.

It's not just lazy, it's derailing.

Covid is real, vaccines are good, etc, etc.

But why has everyone switched like thi? Freyr is correct. The OP put forward the proposition, it's up to them to provide data that makes the case.

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

#536
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...

It’s an interesting theory but the meth from the 1970’s was all P2P and we didn’t see the same impact.

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

#537
This is a massive story and hugely under-reported.

Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths, Davison said.

“What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.”

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

#538

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.

Been a while since I read it, but I seem to remember a false sense of confidence (caused by belief in a normal distribution) being a major theme. Regardless, we should be skeptical of the assumption that we're dealing with a normal distribution.

Yeah I think he used the word intuition. Exactly same insight though. I think “recency” is the bias that causes our view that tomorrow will be pretty similar to today. I’ve noticed it in myself, for sure. Market at X? Yup that seems rational. Hard to imagine the market at 2X or 1/2X. Bitcoin blew my mind during the ultra-growth phases.

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

#539

Another data point that the cure for the pandemic has been worse than the disease.

Well guess we have to build a time machine and run an A/B test where we don't do any of the COVID-19 measures to have a fair comparison, no?

It would be a thousand A/B tests, because there was no one "covid measure". Individual measures like wearing n95s in crowded areas like stores make sense, but not allowing music at gyms is stupid. My childrens' school is still on full lockdown. They are wearing masks outside and must keep distance from each other. And all students are fully vaccinated. Makes no sense.

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

#540
post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Asking someone to look up some numbers for you to complete your random hypothesis isn't exactly constructive either way.

He's asking someone for numbers that prove their own hypothesis. Why is that making you sweat so much?
Post reply on HN