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Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

uk.news.yahoo.com

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Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#111

Post by starkd »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #47
ogogmad wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One person I'm speaking to claims that the NHS hires too many bureaucrats who are impossible to fire, and who he believes provide the doctors with too much paperwork. He suggests that instead of paying those bureaucrats, the money should go to doctors, nurses and equipment. He claims that the NHS gets about the same amount of money - GDP-wise - as other European countries, while underperforming them. They already hir…

I have relatives working in the NHS bureaucracy, even they claim its bloated - there's a fuck tonne of redundancy/duplication of effort and failures to exploit economies of scale, especially in the Trusts system where the same things are replicated dozens of times.

It's the nature of bureacracy. All the incentives are aligned so as not to prioritize efficiency.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#114

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

ben_w wrote: post #94
thrown_22 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The left has somehow ended up as the party of the political managerial class instead of the working class, this is one of the best explanations why we're in such a weird place where the socialists are all trust fund kids who would rather have the working class arrested than talk to them.

If the (UK) left is the party of the political managerial class, what is the (UK) right? When I'm feeling particularly sarcastic I might call them the party of dilettantes, but is that apt?

The party of old people and the underclass.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#115

Post by mellosouls »

Note that while this article is listed as being from Yahoo it's actually sourced from The Telegraph, a right-leaning paper that appears to be on a bit of a crusade at the moment to "right the wrongs of lockdowns" or something.

That's not to say there isn't a story here, or even that they are wrong; just be aware there appears to be an agenda.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#116

Post by tchalla »

zbdngkhab wrote: post #70
julianlam wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why jump to it when simpler explanations exist? Delays in diagnosis or no diagnosis at all is likely a more fitting explanation.

Mass inoculation with a new type of vaccine that behaved very differently than the science hypothesized is also a very simple explanation. I don't really think anyone here has the ability or expertise to judge which is more fitting. For what it's worth, the fact circulatory issues is mentioned in the article should ring alarm bells for COVID vaccines being a potential cause. We just found out recently the prevalence…

It’s not a “simple” explanation if you take some time to understand how vaccine works. Just because there’s a side effect form vaccine doesn’t mean that the vaccine isn’t the best option.

Your thought process is classic example of zero risk bias.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#117

Post by dominotw »

scrlk wrote: post #33
jajahusjsna wrote: post #8

Covid is one aspect of this. Another is the massive. underfunding of the NHS over the last decade. This has become much more evident post-covid thanks to the backlogs. - Getting a GP to see you in person is now quite difficult (they want to do everything via phone). - Seeing your GP (depending on your area) can involve a 2-3 week wait and waiting in an hours long phone queue. - When you are referred to hospital for t…

We are never going to get a serious debate around reforming the NHS until people move on from only comparing the UK to the US. There are many other systems that work - people only need to look across to Europe.

> people only need to look across to Europe.

No they shouldn't be looking europe. Modern healthcare is subsidization of chronically obese people by healthy working class. UK is the most obese country in western europe. Their situation is different cannot be solved by copying ideas from other healthy countries in europe.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#118

Post by specialist »

ogogmad wrote: post #38
jajahusjsna wrote: post #8

Covid is one aspect of this. Another is the massive. underfunding of the NHS over the last decade. This has become much more evident post-covid thanks to the backlogs. - Getting a GP to see you in person is now quite difficult (they want to do everything via phone). - Seeing your GP (depending on your area) can involve a 2-3 week wait and waiting in an hours long phone queue. - When you are referred to hospital for t…

One person I'm speaking to claims that the NHS hires too many bureaucrats who are impossible to fire, and who he believes provide the doctors with too much paperwork. He suggests that instead of paying those bureaucrats, the money should go to doctors, nurses and equipment. He claims that the NHS gets about the same amount of money - GDP-wise - as other European countries, while underperforming them. They already hir…

Exploding admin overhead also plagues USA's healthcare. Here's a popular depiction. https://miro.medium.com/max/1376/0*Tw_O22WQs2yyv0ND.jpg

Regardless of private or public, left- or right-wing, bureaucracy begets more bureaucracy. Like a ratcheting effect.

Complaints about bureaucracy is (at least) as old as written history. You may have seen yesterday's frontpage story "The Collapse of Complex Societies (Book Review)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7207348

Another interesting analysis (for us geeks) is the "complexity catastrophe" described in the book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity. TLDR: Dependencies eventually get so tangled that the cost of change outweighes the expected benefit, and a system which can no longer adapt to the changing world eventually fails outright.

Exploding overhead also happened in education, both K-12 and higher ed. And probably every other mature domain worth examining, if we bothered to look.

Seeing Like a State (James Scott), Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber) and Design Rules (Baldwin, Clark) all address complexity in their own way.

As a geek, I think "path dependent technical debt". For us, there's little to no incentive to cleanup, and certainly no reward, even though everyone moans about it nonstop.

The only notion I have is that, like reducing technical debt, fighting admin overhead (expanding bureaucracy) requires constant effort and investment, that no one is willing to make.

I (greedily) welcome a more optimistic take on this problem, if any one has some ideas. Please.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#119

Post by tchalla »

throwaway499195 wrote: post #88
sudden_dystopia wrote: post #23

Wouldn’t a reasonable hypothesis try to rule out the vaccine? I’m not anti vaccine, I received the vaccine. But if excess death is creeping and it’s not Covid, would t that be one of the first things to rule out? They don’t even indicate that was ruled out, just completely ignored.

Here's my thoughts as someone who's trying to get a paper published that shows that _potentially_ the vaccine is implicated in injuries and we'd like to do more research. We can't say that! It's getting thrown back at us. We're not saying that it's causal, we're not even trying to propose mechanisms. All we're saying is that using government reported data, we see a signal that suggests that certain adverse events are…

I understand your issue but to say your research saves lives is an overstatement. Your implying that the lack of vaccination will save more lives than Covid infection. The fact that you aren’t trying to propose mechanisms is exactly the issue. You’re stoking more public fear by your “simple observation”. So either provide an alternative, or your potential implication is not important enough to merit a publication at this stage.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#120

Post by klabb3 »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #98
ogogmad wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One person I'm speaking to claims that the NHS hires too many bureaucrats who are impossible to fire, and who he believes provide the doctors with too much paperwork. He suggests that instead of paying those bureaucrats, the money should go to doctors, nurses and equipment. He claims that the NHS gets about the same amount of money - GDP-wise - as other European countries, while underperforming them. They already hir…

As someone who was embedded in the NHS for a number of years it has many problems, but counterintuitively one of them is actually a lack of paper pushers or at least low level admin and other auxiliary staff. Because governments have constantly demanded the NHS spend less money, but have also been under pressure to preserve numbers of "front line" staff you've ended up with serious shortages of low level admins, medi…

The shift in the western world into paper pushing in healthcare, education, construction, etc doesn't always come in the form of more bureaucrats. Sometimes it's teachers spending time with ever more frequent and granular grading and survey systems, and doctors filling forms for hours a day.

It feels like the McKinsey-style design of large orgs has permeated the public sector just as much if not more than the private one. It always comes with a massive amount of procedure – employee surveys, follow-ups and meaningless 10-scale measurements, so that leadership can rest easy knowing that every decision they make is data driven. Somehow a spreadsheet analyst should be able to diagnose and fix every possible issue in an incremental manner, and conversely, all poor decisions are due to insufficient data.

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