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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

#251

Post by nn3 »

irrational wrote: post #230
nn3 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's similar to the well known "more likely to be hit by a meteorite than to win the lottery" style statements. Obviously that's completely wrong: i've never heard of anyone being hit by a meteorite, but people win the lottery every month. I'm not saying that they're actively lying, but it seems some assumptions in these frequentist's numbers are just not correct.

https://astronomy.com/news/2020/05/death-from-above-7-unluck... Just last year a woman had just gotten out of bed when a meteorite came through her ceiling and hit her pillow where her head had been.

I was actually aware of that story. But she wasn't hit, so it doesn't invalidate my statement.

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

#252

Post by Spooky23 »

csee wrote: post #235
Spooky23 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-vaccination people don’t need facts, so anything that creates FUD works for them. I live in a protest corridor, and the “freedom lovers” were demanding that we sacrifice the weak and old so that they could enjoy not getting a vaccine. It’s a gross type of mental illness.

> "freedom lovers" were demanding that we sacrifice the weak and old Isn't it the opposite? I recall various right-leaning figures talking about 'sacrificing' the young . Release them in order to get natural immunity, while locking up the old until that process is done. I think that was a rather bad idea, especially with the hindsight of knowing how quickly the vaccines were ready, but that's separate.

Like I said, they don’t make a lot of sense. I think there’s a few different branches of that approach.

Why people were picketing a hospital with “sacrifice the weak” signs was very puzzling. But they were!

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

#254

Post by atom_arranger »

amelius wrote: post #135
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem that is unbelievable at all to me. Instead I think it just highlights how humans can discount the severity of something when it moves slowly and continues for years. Remember the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 that was a major catastrophe around the world? According to a Google search it killed 227,898 people. Last I checked Covid had killed about 5.5 million, which is worse that every single war since WWII.…

You probably should use this measure instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-years_lost

Regardless of what measure you’re using it would also be good to make it per person.

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

#255

Post by exdsq »

ganoushoreilly wrote: post #57
andrewclunn wrote: post #12

> "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 were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319." So last year more covid deaths (particularly among the elderly), but while those numbers have de…

Within my brothers circle of friends / former friends etc, amongst those that participate in recreational drug use, there have been a crazy number of Fentanyl related deaths. They're all between the ages of 25 - 30. I can't help but wonder how much this has an impact.

I read fentanyl killed more people than Covid in SF last year - don’t think there were any age brackets on that either

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

#256

Post by LorenPechtel »

shadowgovt wrote: post #238

With few exceptions, if you want to know what's really going on, the insurance companies are the numbers to draw from. They have a vested interest in knowing what's happening and people usually have a vested interest in reporting to them to collect resources. (The exception is when there are secondary effects. Auto insurance reporting under samples minor accidents, because people don't want to risk their perfect driv…

Note that life insurance isn't going to be a good model--there are two selection biases at work here.

1) Those in ill health likely can't afford life insurance.

2) Life insurance is mostly to provide for dependents--which means people in good enough shape to have dependents and people are young enough to still have dependents. (Once the kids are grown there's much less reason for term life insurance.)

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

#257

Post by LorenPechtel »

maxerickson wrote: post #123
seoaeu wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You allege bias, but the CEO of your life insurance company is like the textbook example of someone whose incentives are aligned with yours…

How come they market whole life policies? There's narrow circumstances where they might make sense, but that's about it.

Good for locking in a customer.

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

#258

Post by CodeGlitch »

erdewit wrote: post #183

Here in the Netherlands there's also a sharp increase in the excess mortality that can't be explained by COVID deaths. https://www.rivm.nl/monitoring-sterftecijfers-nederland

People not wanting to see a doctor or go to hospital for non COVID related health issues out of fear?

Reduced capacity in the health service for stuff like cancer?

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

#259

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

richardw wrote: post #229
chmod600 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> See the housing crisis during which experts and laypeople were equally fooled.

Not discounting your main point, but there were plenty of experts and laypeople that were completely unsurprised by the housing crisis. If anything, I think the housing crisis was more of a case that so many people had a vested interest in thinking/pretending the music would never stop.

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

#260

Post by agmsr »

jeffbee wrote: post #29
agmsr wrote: post #21

I wonder what the fentanyl factor is.

Just idly wondering about information readily available from primary sources (CDC WISQARS database) does not advance the conversation.

I was referring to the Indiana life insurance company’s data, which doesn’t seem to be broken out.
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