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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

#541
post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very powerful argument for legalising forms of those drugs for recreational use.

Yea please! Decriminalizing would be a great first step but won't cut out the cartels and gangs and adulteration (kind word for poisoning..) Would also love to see over the counter narcan. suboxone for any who wants it without the compliance burden.

Narcan is available "behind the counter" in most states. You have to ask for it, but a prescription isn't required.[1]

[1] https://www.cvs.com/content/prescription-drug-abuse/save-a-l...

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

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do those countries have drug epidemics?

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...

Blaming life expectancy drop on "undetected" covid without any evidence is not very scientific. I can say it's undetected drug overdoses too.

Maybe either root the logic in facts, or don't write off alternative possibilities.

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

#543

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…

From the article this discussion is about "Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths, Davison said."

I am confused why you are completely ignoring this statement and trying to claim the exact opposite.

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

#544
post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s cheaper now and way more socially acceptable (decriminalized) to use meth in public (at least in west coast states). My dad was a meth user and only got clean when he was incarcerated. I bet there are thousands who just spiral downward further and further until they just die because now there are no consequences or barriers or repercussions to stop this behavior. Not only that, we incentivize and subsidize drug use in some cities. San Francisco has an “adult” support program that gives homeless people a debit card which they can withdraw cash from. I guarantee 90% of that cash is spent on fentanyl and meth. They give out dozens of needles at a time (once saw one dude with literally 300-500 needles) to drug users but not to diabetics. We have really skewed/inverted our priorities.

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

#546
post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link or source to support your hypothesis? It should be trivial to provide it.

OP says deaths among people 20-40 are up 45%, and inferred that this is due to Covid. That’s the hypothesis being made here. And it contradicts what’s in the parent article, namely that many of these deaths are from causes other than Covid: “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 wer…

The article is talking about deaths by Nov 2020 compared to Nov 2021 when there was an accessible effective vaccine. Parent comment is talking about increase of deaths from 2019 to 2020. I don't see the applicability of that quote. (Maybe OP and you and me are all off topic, but here we are.)

[0] has no statistics on opioid deaths. [1] says that the deaths were going to be higher in Vermont, at (a projected) 200 deaths for the year vs 157 for the previous. That's maybe meaningful, but isn't limited to the age group the post parent was discussing. [2] Does not have year over year statistics to compare against. Just that it was the worst, and is drawing on a smaller sample size than [1].

If (and this kind of seems like a big if) Vermont is representative of the rest of the US, *and* the age group he was discussing then maybe you have one source that supports your claim that a large portion of the deaths are from additional opioid deaths.

On the other hand assuming the root of the increase of all cause mortality between 2019 and 2020 among adults is mostly uncorrelated with the pandemic is a tough thing to convince me of. Can you please provide a source showing the national increase of opioid overdoses and suicide between 2019 and 2020 among the 20-40 age group?

Note I agree entirely that there were more overdose deaths in the US in 2020 than 2019 (that's easy to source https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...) what is hard is breaking it down into these smaller nuggets that we're discussing.

ETA: I couldn't find the original NY Times article grand-grand-grand... parent talked about that got us down this path, but this is pretty convincing that all cause mortality increased by at least 45% https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7376843/

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

#547
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not mis-read your comment, it was a continuation of the commentary on how mandated WFH and government-enforced isolation has essentially just moved deaths from column A to column B over the long run. people are actually closer than ever to their family (or house-mates) due to COVID Yes, this is the perception for many people who have family or housemates. In the same way the rich have gotten richer, the sociall…

As always in our beloved capitalist society where we live according to the laws of the jungle: The vulnerable and poorest suffer the most.

My wife's parents grew up in a communist society. Everyone got the same but political connection got you better.

So the poor still suffered only they were politically poor not cash poor.

Capitalism has it's problems but so do all systems. Allocating resources is a very hard problem.

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

#548

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…

> July, 2019: 11,000 dead

> July, 2020: 16,000 dead

> But it's still a 45% increase, so that age group was the worst affected, in terms of the increase in death.

You can't draw that conclusion at all with, effectively, one data point while assuming the other is a baseline. You need to develop a proper statistical profile, determine the mean, variance/standard deviation, standard error and then try to understand the numbers to make inferences.

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

#549
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.

I'm not seeing anyone mention obesity.

Sitting around at home all day can also cause weight gain. Is there any data on this?

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

#550
post #480
post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that calculation makes sense. If someone has already lived to 77 he probably has a much higher chance of living to 78 than the average person. And if someone has lived past 78 does that mean he's lost negative years of life?

Yep, 78 is life expectancy at birth. Your life expectancy goes up every day you are alive.

Well... every day bar one.
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