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Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

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Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#261

Post by brandonmenc »

jschwartzi wrote: post #156
maerF0x0 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something to consider if you see anyone trying to downplay this. I admit I'm the morbid one in the group, memento mori and all. But I think the real stat we should track is years of lost life expectancy. That's the only statistic that makes sense when doing cross disease examinations. Not speaking specifically about covid, but more generally, something which primarily kills young people is much bigger deal than som…

YLL is a horrifying metric because it values someone who is 20 over someone who is 60. The only argument I can see for its "usefulness" as a statistic is if you want to imply that the old are less useful than the young. This kind of statement about the bare utility of a human life is the same statement that underlies a lot of how we have treated the disabled or those on welfare in the past. And it only makes sense if…

> YLL is a horrifying metric because it values someone who is 20 over someone who is 60.

Not to my father, who is in his late 60s and the most at-risk member of the family, and who has been more opposed to the lockdowns than any of us.

His calculation is that at some point - for the good of the family, long-term - the economic damage and delayed social development of his grandchildren outweigh his personal safety.

I have encountered very few older people who don't also think this way.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#262

Post by lamontcg »

timr wrote: post #20

This isn't a "study", it's a statistical model. It reflects the assumptions put into it. To wit: > Our analysis follows four key steps. First, for all locations where weekly or monthly all-cause mortality has been reported since the start of the pandemic, we estimate how much mortality increased compared to the expected death rate....Second, based on a range of studies and consideration of other evidence, we estimate…

The IHME has been wildly wrong yet highly cited for over a year now. I've still got screencaps of their models that predict around 90,000 total deaths in the USA by the end of 2020. They were lifting a sigmoid curve off of China's numbers and applying it to the United States entirely blindly. It didn't even predict the shape of the decline off the first peak correctly since it was implicitly assuming the US would take similar steps to China (martial law) and drive the R0 down to 0.4 or so.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#263

Post by 988747 »

username90 wrote: post #245
standardUser wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If hospitals are full, not all people who need care can get care. It's not a complicated concept. ICUs in many parts of the country hit capacity during the pandemic, and that was with radical efforts to limit the spread of the virus.

Ventilators weren't as needed as originally thought. USA even killed a lot of patients by being over eager putting them into ventilators. If you put a healthy person in a ventilator there are a few percent chance of giving them pneumonia which typically kills them. When you blast air into their lungs it is really easy to accidentally blast bacteria all over them as well. The articles about "we now know better how to…

> When you blast air into their lungs it is really easy to accidentally blast bacteria all over them as well

You might consider yourself lucky if they blast air into your lungs. Italian healthcare was using pure oxygen, which, used at prolonged periods of time basically burns your lungs. Some government officials recently admitted that this caused a lot of "COVID" deaths.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#264

Post by timr »

lamontcg wrote: post #262
timr wrote: post #20

This isn't a "study", it's a statistical model. It reflects the assumptions put into it. To wit: > Our analysis follows four key steps. First, for all locations where weekly or monthly all-cause mortality has been reported since the start of the pandemic, we estimate how much mortality increased compared to the expected death rate....Second, based on a range of studies and consideration of other evidence, we estimate…

The IHME has been wildly wrong yet highly cited for over a year now. I've still got screencaps of their models that predict around 90,000 total deaths in the USA by the end of 2020. They were lifting a sigmoid curve off of China's numbers and applying it to the United States entirely blindly. It didn't even predict the shape of the decline off the first peak correctly since it was implicitly assuming the US would tak…

There has been a ton of terrible modeling this year, and the IHME is just one example. This week the CDC published an ensemble of models trained on Covid case data up to March 27.

The models completely mispredict the actual number of cases since that time:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0qZTvVVkAIs484?format=jpg&name=...

This is a total failure of validation that would make any other practitioner question the whole exercise, but it didn't stop the CDC from publishing them. Nor did it stop the news media from trumpeting the results. The Washington Post and CNBC and others wrote headline articles fawning over them.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#265

Post by lamontcg »

maxfurman wrote: post #178
whimsicalism wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would generally expect non-covid deaths to be down as is indicated by correlations between mortality and economic decline, the fact that suicides haven't trended substantially upwards, and the fact that cars are off the road.

I saw an article to the effect that car-related deaths are up because, since there are fewer cars on the road, the drivers who are left drive faster and/or more recklessly and get in more accidents. So, as with everything in this pandemic, it's complicated...

Yeah I was struck by how fucking insane people got on the roads shortly after the pandemic struck.

You'd think people would chill out because the roads were practically empty, but I guess pandemic stress combined with the immediate rage of "the roads are empty and this asshole camper is only doing 75 mph in left lane" leading to absolute lunacy at very high speeds.

Normal levels of rush hour traffic around here mean nobody can do more than 50 mph at best with an average speed closer to 35, which probably keeps the deaths down.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#266

Post by username90 »

lostlogin wrote: post #200
whimsicalism wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the number of years lost with social distancing. You could make this same argument about anything that causes large amounts of deaths.

> You could make this same argument about anything that causes large amounts of deaths. The cumulative time wasted by humanity each day by putting seatbelts on or by stopping for red lights.

Is very small compared to the lives saved by those measures. Traffic safety laws saves about 20k young people per year in USA. Assume each had 40 years left to live, that is 0.8 million years, or about 0.002 years per person per year. That is about half a day of life saved per year per person, meaning 12 hours. Putting on a seatbelt takes a few seconds and you do it a few times per day, say 20 seconds per day. Add that up over a year and you get 100 minutes or about 2 hours spent seatbelting to save 12 hours of life.

Traffic lights takes more time, but they also allows for more dense traffic so I don't think that removing them would help at all. I doubt San Francisco traffic would get any better if you removed most traffic lights, likely it would get worse in all the chaos, so unless you prove to me that they actually hurt commute time rather than help I put those savings on the seatbelts.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#267

Post by betwixthewires »

standardUser wrote: post #138
tomp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something to consider if you see anyone trying to downplay this. It's invalid reasoning to use this study to "upplay" the pandemic. It includes deaths due to depressions and delayed medical interventions, which you could argue isn't the result of COVID directly, but the result of lockdowns. So when people use this study to claim "see, this many lives were lost, we were right to institute lockdowns" - that's circula…

If there had been no mitigation efforts the death toll would have skyrocketed as our healthcare systems collapsed.

You say that, and they said it (only 90s kids will remember "fifteen days to slow the spread") but as of right now, it's a truism. Maybe the lockdown worked to ease the stress on the medical system. Maybe only the first 15 days of lockdown did that, or 30. I highly doubt that the entire year of lockdowns saved the medical system, and I would be willing to bet the effectiveness of the lockdowns in preventing a collapse of the medical system ended within the first 3 months. So suppose that's true, 3/4ths of the lockdown and all the mental health and depression related deaths associated with it were unnecessary. I don't know when the lockdowns stopped being effective in protecting the medical system, but I know it wasn't this morning. Some amount of those deaths are attributed to lockdowns that were unnecessary.

Also, you can't quantify the hypothetical death toll in that scenario in any real numbers, to say "would have skyrocketed" is unfounded. I could understand "would've been higher" that sounds reasonable.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#268

Post by Teknoman117 »

gizmo686 wrote: post #99
Teknoman117 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> did so after traveling to Florida to catch covid uh, what? I don't understand why anyone would willingly try to catch a disease... (get your kids the chickenpox vaccine, don't do those chickenpox parties if those still exist. The vaccine drastically reduces the occurrence shingles later in life. I'm a bit envious that my younger sisters got it, but I got chickenpox as a child. Seeing it flare up in my dad every 18…

FYI, if you have had chickenpox, you can get a shingles vaccine https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/shingles/public/shingrix/in...

> Studies show that more than 99% of Americans 40 years and older have had chickenpox, even if they don’t remember having the disease.

I'm a little surprised that the quoted age of most Americans having it is not less than that. The chickenpox vaccine was only authorized for use in the US in 1995 (I was born a bit before that, my siblings after that). That would make everyone 28 or older at least 2 years old before the vaccine came out in the US, which is the most likely age people got it.

(Assuming that immigrants in the window of 1988 to 1995 from nations who authorized in that period do not make up a substantial fraction of the present US population).

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#269

Post by akomtu »

Basically, it's nothing to worry about. On an average year, about 2.5 million people die in the US, with at least 600k from cancer. Another data point is that something like 2.3 millions sit in the US prisons right now, so if the 900k number makes you terrified, you should be 3x more terrified about ending up in a prison one day and Nx more terrified by cancer, as for each cancer death, there are tens living in misery fighting that cancer.

Re: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

#270

Post by option »

exporectomy wrote: post #147
option wrote: post #122

About time we start asking hard questions on the virus origin.

OK. You can start.

It is totally a coincidence not worth investigating that the covid outbreak started in a city with the lab that holds the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses.

for starters let’s have WHO investigate it by a team not led by the guy who was a close collaborator with Wuhan lab.

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