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Excess Deaths in 2020

kieranhealy.org

201–210 of 220 posts

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've got a fundamentally different society and lockdown is a luxury policy that only rich nations (and people) can afford.

> They've got a fundamentally different society You have to say more than this.

Didn't India also aggressively lock down in the beginning as well? Not sure what point the Op was trying to make here.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#202

I'm curious if there's a good way to breakdown how much is caused by COVID vs., say, caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides, etc.). For example the US suicide rate declined from 2018 to 2019, but went back up in 2020. Naively assuming that all of the increase was due to the effects of the lockdowns would attribute ~2,880 suicides to them (or more if in a counterfactual world the su…

> caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides, etc.) That's a dangerous way to phrase it. People would delay the elective medical procedures due to covid, even without lockdown. Overwhelmed hospitals would enforce the same. The covid/lockdown split of excess deaths is very complicated in itself.

In my country medical help got way more difficult to get in early 2020 despite having comparatively few cases. Hospitals were not overrun. It was purely because of lockdowns and constant scaremongering.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#203

I'm curious if there's a good way to breakdown how much is caused by COVID vs., say, caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides, etc.). For example the US suicide rate declined from 2018 to 2019, but went back up in 2020. Naively assuming that all of the increase was due to the effects of the lockdowns would attribute ~2,880 suicides to them (or more if in a counterfactual world the su…

On the other hand Covid-19 would have killed many more people directly if action hadn't been taken to mitigate it's spread. Probably exponentially more people, based on how viruses typically spread. In other words, the comparison isn't between how many people Covid-19 did kill and how many preventative measures did. It's between how many it would have killed and how many preventative measures did. While there's a lot…

Not sure. Sweden had no strict lockdowns. No mask mandates (only recommendation to use one in public transport during rush hour). They also had a lot of deaths in nursing homes when the COVID first hit. Meanwhile my country (Lithuania) was in strict lockdown last spring and is still in lockdown from the beginning of November. It was made stricter mid-December and only recently some restrictions started to be dropped. So while in strict lockdown we managed to catch-up and surpass Sweden by the number of deaths per million.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#204

I'm curious if there's a good way to breakdown how much is caused by COVID vs., say, caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides, etc.). For example the US suicide rate declined from 2018 to 2019, but went back up in 2020. Naively assuming that all of the increase was due to the effects of the lockdowns would attribute ~2,880 suicides to them (or more if in a counterfactual world the su…

> In the UK a study predicts a 7.9-9.6% increase in breast cancer deaths within 5 years of diagnosis due to diagnostic delays caused by COVID. [...] Basically I guess what I'm really trying to get at is that while COVID is certainly a terrible disease, there seems to have been little to no cost-benefit analysis performed by policy makers regarding the lockdowns and other attempts to combat it. I see this line of reas…

In Lithuania health care barely functioned in mid-2020 purely because of the anti-pandemic measures and restrictions not because of being overwhelmed. It's only by the end of the year when the big second wave hit they were stressed. Yet many months lost because of lockdowns and bad decisions.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overwhelmed hospitals would enforce the same. Not necessarily. There is always the option of triaging COVID victims into palliative care (which can be very fast and administered even by non-specialist personnel) and away from intensive care. While that has never been official policy due to the political optics, there have been claims that it was done on a hospital-by-hospital basis in Italy and Sweden for elderly v…

You think the public would have shown significant support for “just let the infected die”? And you can add Canada to that list of countries that have had to do that, by the way. Like the others you mention it’s been a forced decision due to the healthcare system becoming overwhelmed.

The public may not have significantly supported that in the first lockdown last year, but there apparently has been support in later waves. In my country during the third wave, the health minister has pleaded that hospitals are being overwhelmed, yet at the same time the data he’s getting from mobile operators show that the public has returned to 2019-levels of mobility. The broad public, not just some outliers unwilling to observe the lockdown. The general attitude now seems to be that vaccination has arrived, so restrictions are no longer appropriate, and if you die before you can get vaccinated, tough luck.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suicides declined in 2020 [1] Cost benefit analysis is important. But it's pretty clear the vast majority of excess deaths were covid related, because there's a very strong correlation between excess deaths and reported covid cases/deaths, even when you look at different states that had different peaks at different times, and no such correlation to other responses like different types of lockdowns. More delayed / ind…

Isnt that true during many major world events that are bad? I cant remember the study but I recall reading that during WW1 and WW2 suicides declined greatly even though it was a terrible time for many.

Because you don't think too much about your own suffering when you hear about the suffering of others... probably.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#207
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's absolutely no correlation between lockdown policy and mortality. For example, click the link above and compare Florida to California. Florida has been wide open since last summer (over 9 months now) and has performed about the same as California. And you can cherry pick Hawaii, but New York and New Jersey have been among the most strict lockdowns and they find themselves in the top 3. It seems to help to be a…

Explain Melbourne, Australia.

It stands to reason that actually locking people up in their homes for several weeks would have a significant effect on viral spread, especially if done early, in a wealthy country where people have a lot of individual living space.

Most lockdowns are not like that, for practical reasons. They are a random basket of restrictions that go into effect when the virus has already spread enough to cause great concern. At that point, it is hard to discern whether any of these restrictions cause a significant effect, much less a net benefit.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#208
post #2

This is terrible, but at least I can show this to my "AlL-CaUsE MorTAlItY WiLl Be tHe SaMe" friend so he can ignore it.

You're made for each other. Excess deaths capture the deaths from lockdown related causes too, like my grandmother, who died when her social life was indefinitely stopped, and teenagers that committed suicide due to lockdowns Excess deaths don't tell us how deadly COVID really was, they tell us how deadly COVID plus the COVID response really were. Someday historians will argue: which was worse? The disease or the tre…

It would be interesting if we could "reload from a save point" and try surviving the pandemic without lockdowns. IMO the number of COVID deaths would be higher. Of course some people think otherwise would hypothize the opposite.

I guess a glib response would be to say "Look at fucking India right now". And it's a bit binary to argue e.g. "Sweden didn't have a lockdown, look, it wasn't that badthere.". Uh, even without a lockdown, Swedes changed their behavior (a lot of work from home, cafes and restaurants became emptier), and if we reloaded from that save point and didn't impose lockdowns, the cautious people would still stay home. And I wonder how many of the "But muh freedom!" moaners would be name-calling responsible organizers who cancelled concerts and festivals as "fascist nazis", etc.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're made for each other. Excess deaths capture the deaths from lockdown related causes too, like my grandmother, who died when her social life was indefinitely stopped, and teenagers that committed suicide due to lockdowns Excess deaths don't tell us how deadly COVID really was, they tell us how deadly COVID plus the COVID response really were. Someday historians will argue: which was worse? The disease or the tre…

> Excess deaths capture the deaths from lockdown related causes too, like my grandmother, who died when her social life was indefinitely stopped, and teenagers that committed suicide due to lockdowns If only we had an easy mathematical tool to calculate how many people in the excess mortality numbers didn't die of COVID. We could call it "subtraction".

But whether someone died of Covid or not is also another area of dispute. The "it's just a flu" crowd can cite dubious websites saying "Oh the government is fudging the stats, there were many deaths being recorded as Covid-deaths even if they're not (Stupid example: man flies off motorcycle into wall, dies. Autopsy shows he has the virus in his blood, the conspiracy theorists will say the Illuminati/Bill Gates/the government will record that as a death due to Covid).

Inversely, there's also reports of governments not testing people who died for the virus, to make their numbers look good so they don't end up in some "Do not travel" list, or because they don't want their population angry and removing them from power. Even India is still fudging its numbers lately.

At least it's hard to dispute the status of being dead, and "excess deaths" is a usable number.

Re: Excess Deaths in 2020

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per your bio, you work at Google. You're divorced from the experience of struggling people.

That is an extremely presumptuous statement to make. You know nothing of their background, upbringing, path to where they are today. I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish in this thread anymore, but it certainly is not constructive.

> That is an extremely presumptuous statement to make.

No, especially in the context of the pandemic, it's easy to start talking about pandemic policy as though "everyone should just do X" where X is something extremely convenient, profitable, even pleasant for tech workers and other white collar jobs.

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