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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

#181

Post by sigstoat »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #140
resoluteteeth wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Why does the fact that it is larger than 3 standard deviations suggest to you that it must be an artifact? If the death rate is normally very stable then the standard deviation will be small, so it will be easy for any unusual incre…

I think the other thing that may be possible (just guessing, I'm not a statistician or actuarial) is that by using the term "3 sigma" I'm assuming they're modeling the data as a normal distribution. But these types of outlier events often follow power laws, such that you get "fat tails" when looking at a bell curve.

> that by using the term "3 sigma" I'm assuming they're modeling the data as a normal distribution

variance and standard deviation don't only apply to normal distributions. and "sigma" is the symbol normally used for variance regardless of the underlying distribution.

> I'm assuming

sigh.

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

#182

Post by chmod600 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #163
encoderer wrote: post #138

> 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.” Do we have an actuarial crisis on our hands? We’ve seen the same thing in finance, disaster preparedness and other unrelated industries. We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years. And how does it…

I commented on this elsewhere, but I think your point is fair. Many real-world processes follow power laws, but they are modeled as normal distributions. The issue with that is that a power law can "look like" a normal distribution, except it has fat tails, where you get these "once until the heat death of the universe" type events much more frequently.

Black Swan by Nassim Taleb is an entire book about this very common mistake.

It's a case where highly-educated people often make errors that laypersons would not.

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

#184

Post by michaelt »

TRossi wrote: 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…

> 3 standard deviations, which is really unbelievable

People reporting on deaths have to average over a period, otherwise you find deaths drop on weekends and spike on mondays because that's when the paperwork gets processed. In this case, they're averaging over an entire quarter.

I could well believe that the variance in death rates between Q4 2008 and Q4 2018 had a standard deviation of 3% - an entire quarter is a lot of averaging.

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

#185

Post by jeremyjh »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #155
encoderer wrote: post #138

> 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.” Do we have an actuarial crisis on our hands? We’ve seen the same thing in finance, disaster preparedness and other unrelated industries. We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years. And how does it…

>We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years. I just don't take it seriously anymore. Track 200 factors, 200 businesses, or 200 industries and you will see 1 event per year. Track all of the above and you will see 40,000 such events in a year. More to the point, their actuarial model was probably wrong, not reality. Somewhere buried in their model were assumptions exclu…

I think the more thought-provoking question is what exactly is the Black Swan event? If only 37% of their ICU beds are used for COVID patients then why are so many more people dying right now?

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

#186

Post by hervature »

My hypothesis is that this is caused from diabetes. I first learned about this when my friend was diagnosed with diabetes at the beginning of the pandemic. He said that Stanford was investigating a potential connection. Now there is a bit more literature [1]. If you go to [2] and select "Weekly Number of Deaths by Cause Subgroup" and then "Other select causes" from the dropdown, you will see that diabetes jumped up at the start of the pandemic and has stayed at ~40% increased levels since.

[1] - https://www.nih.gov/how-covid-19-can-lead-diabetes

[2] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

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

#187

Post by deepnotderp »

whatever1 wrote: post #24
agmsr wrote: post #21

I wonder what the fentanyl factor is.

Fentanyl factor did not start in March of 2020.

Social isolation is well known to probably be the number one factor driving drug abuse (see eg Rat park experiments). Lockdowns, no school, etc…

In teenagers this has already caused a spike in mental illnesses.

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

#188

Post by mlyle »

jeffbee wrote: post #180
mlyle wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The article appears to attribute all accidental poisoning to fentanyl. That seems like an error. I don't think it does. Sure, they throw out the 100k overdoses number at the end, which isn't specific to fentanyl, but the other numbers they cite are around 40k/year and a run rate of 64k/year by Deceber 2021. Current data is here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm It's about 62k deaths from sy…

That data is for all ages. If you go to WISQARS and filter for ages 18-45, which is the subject of the news site's article, it looks to me like the numbers they are giving in the article are the same as the total number of accidental poisoning.

They're pulling from this fact sheet:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S0szR2Ua9v0Sr91YhDD7gPrXsDk...

Topic 1 is on ages 18-45: more deaths from fentanyl than from...

The later topics are on all ages.

The fact sheet attributes 24k deaths in the age range to fentanyl in 2019. WISQARS accidental injuries from poisoning in the age range were 38k in 2019. 2/3rds in that age range being fentanyl is totally plausible.

https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D157;jsessioni... has the broken down data. They have 36,907 deaths in 2020 from 18-45 with T40.4-- "other synthetic opioids excluding methadone". FAF is calling all deaths from synthetic opioids fentanyl, which isn't quite true but it's very likely close to true.

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

#189

Post by woodruffw »

mlyle wrote: post #171
woodruffw wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government data does not say that. The CDC recorded 100k drug overdose deaths in 2020[1], ~75% of which were from opioids. They don't have a breakdown of how many of those 75k opioid deaths were fentanyl, but it's an order of magnitude below just the confirmed number of COVID-19 deaths in 2020[2]. Edit: The reporting in this article is remarkably bad: it confuses a two-year range (Jan-2020 to Dec-2021) with a one-yea…

I agree the report makes its point poorly and phrases statistics carelessly, but you made a similar mistake: they explicitly state it exceeds COVID deaths over ages 18-45. All these media reports were all influenced by this underlying factsheet from FAF. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S0szR2Ua9v0Sr91YhDD7gPrXsDk... Broadly, it appears true: fentanyl deaths look like they outweigh all those things in the younger pop…

Thanks for linking the factsheet. These deaths are a useless tragedy, and it frustrates me to see them framed against another useless tragedy.

The CDC's death count with age breakdowns[1] shows that over twice as many people aged 18-64 died of COVID-19 than drug overdoes, combined across 2020 and 2021. That flips when you limit it to just 18-45, which is the statistic FAF is using.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...

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