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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

#361
post #237
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sudden cardiac death has always been surprisingly frequent in healthy athletes, so there’s a lot of room for observational bias here. (2016) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4969030/ > A recent estimate of SCD incidence ranged from 1 in 40,000 to 1 in 80,000 athletes per year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_association_footballer... 21 in 2021 3 in 2020 3 in 2019 4 in 2018 7 in 2017 8 in 2016 9 in 2015 5 in 2014 10 in 2013 8 in 2012 3 in 2011 9 in 2010 Something is different about 2021. I'm not a data analyst, but maybe somebody can quantify how 2021 is an outlier.

That’s not a complete list for any year, so comparisons of counts is meaningless - again, lots of room for biases to creep in here.

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

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m so sorry. My father-in-law has had his “elective” surgery to deal with a hernia cancelled twice due to hospital overcapacity, and all we can do is pray that Germany’s current restrictions will have kept the numbers low enough for his current appointment this week and likely follow up procedure to deal with tachycardia to happen. They’re not even talking about rescheduling the hernia surgery anytime soon - he’s ma…

I don’t disagree but I think we should also be demanding more capacity from our hospitals and maybe just maybe demanding actual universal healthcare. It’s so bizarre to me that that’s not even on the table but it’s because most just assume we have to have a for-profit medical system.

Isn't Germany's healthcare system already universal, and their support for elderly people quite generous?

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

#363
post #237
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sudden cardiac death has always been surprisingly frequent in healthy athletes, so there’s a lot of room for observational bias here. (2016) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4969030/ > A recent estimate of SCD incidence ranged from 1 in 40,000 to 1 in 80,000 athletes per year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_association_footballer... 21 in 2021 3 in 2020 3 in 2019 4 in 2018 7 in 2017 8 in 2016 9 in 2015 5 in 2014 10 in 2013 8 in 2012 3 in 2011 9 in 2010 Something is different about 2021. I'm not a data analyst, but maybe somebody can quantify how 2021 is an outlier.

[deleted]

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

#364
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anchoring like that is a problem when it's used to dismiss something: "Eh, more people die from fentanyl, so X isn't so bad" . Which disregards that X may be a new source of increased deaths, not to mention that when X == COVID, the methods needed to mitigate the risk are antithetical to a mindset of "it's no big deal" because that mindset pushes back against taking even some minimal precuations. So, anchoring can he…

>"Eh, more people die from fentanyl, so X isn't so bad" The increase in deaths is being driven by lockdown/social isolation so it looks more like medical triage. Who do you save, upperclass/baby boomers who generally don't have these problems or disenfranchised young?

> The increase in deaths is being driven by lockdown/social isolation so it looks more like medical triage.

This is an argument many make, but it's not a really good argument.

- Fentanyl deaths were trending up before 2020.

- The degree to which fentanyl is lacing other street drugs is unprecedented and seemingly independent of lockdown.

- Look, we don't really have "lockdown" anymore.

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

#365

Another data point that the cure for the pandemic has been worse than the disease.

Well guess we have to build a time machine and run an A/B test where we don't do any of the COVID-19 measures to have a fair comparison, no?

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

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

think of it this way, 1 in 200 means the chance that you will not die is 99.5% When put that way, sounds pretty good, right?

Think of it this way, 1 in 200 means the chance that you will die is 10x worse than that of someone base jumping[0]. When put this way, sounds pretty bad, right? [0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17495709/

No, I mean, 1 in 200 chance here refers to living, which includes all activities, including BASE jumping

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

#367
Well a few months back in official UK mortality statistics from the ONS you could see a massive increase in the non-covid death rate for vaccinated people, but no one in the health authorities seemed to notice or feel the need to explain it.

Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28532552

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

#368
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he's making a statement saying that his data shows working age people dying at a higher rate. It says nothing about elderly people. The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people. ... Davison said the increase in deaths (that his company sees) represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people…

Yes, he is making a comment on his data and as an insurer this data only includes working age people, not the elderly. So of course he doesn't see elderly deaths because they aren't in his data set But since his data set is limited, we just can't draw this conclusion

You are simply reading this wrong. If you want to prove that to yourself, call up this guy and talk to him. He will tell you you're stating something totally obvious and making a very silly distinction. You're agreeing with him violently. Come back in a couple of years and re-read this, you'll realize your interpretation is wrong.

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

#369
post #172

> 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…

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.

They're not lying. It's just meteorite kills are very clumpy.

I'm not a lottery player so I can't give a good estimate on the number of lottery winners, but for the major jackpots I'll guess many per year.

AFIAK we have no documented meteorite deaths--but it looks like the destruction of Sodom (of biblical fame) was a meteorite. While obviously we have no death toll it's obviously a *lot* of years of major lottery wins. The atmosphere stops most of the stuff but when something's big enough to get through it makes quite a boom. (Chelyabinsk was half a megaton but was high enough up the blast only caused harm by throwing broken windows at people. Tunguska, however was a few megatons and got low enough to be a city-killer. All it blew up was forest for probably zero deaths, but had it fallen 7 hours earlier the world would be a different place because it would have wiped out Leningrad.)

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

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty normal, at least for the last few decades of American life. There is not a major natural cause of death for people 18-65. They die of suicide, accidental overdoses, and car crashes.

When we say "overdoses", doesn't it sound like the person's fault, when it was probably that they were sold a poisoned/cut batch? I wonder how many "overdoses" would have been avoided if you could buy drugs at a pharmacy.

A lot of times an overdose occurs if a person got clean for a while then went back to using. They tend to start using at their previous levels even though their body is no longer used to that level, so it's a sudden jolt that kills them. So I've read - I have zero experience with drugs, luckily.
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