Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thecentersquare.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 600 posts

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

#451

Post by woodruffw »

geoduck14 wrote: post #448
woodruffw wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mis-read my comment. The irony is that people are actually closer than ever to their family (or house-mates) due to COVID, which is pushing suicide rates down.

>people are actually closer than ever to their family Domestic abuse is really high now - because of all of the "close familyness" going on. Also, there is a "National Emergency" for pediatric mental health. [0]. This is not a trivial fact [0] https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/zLatest_News/Pediatricians_CAPs_...

Close as in proximate, not as in intimate. And as I said, it’s a cruel twist.

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

#452

Post by geoduck14 »

mmcgaha wrote: post #434
kirse wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not mis-read your comment, it was a continuation of the commentary on how mandated WFH and government-enforced isolation has essentially just moved deaths from column A to column B over the long run. people are actually closer than ever to their family (or house-mates) due to COVID Yes, this is the perception for many people who have family or housemates. In the same way the rich have gotten richer, the sociall…

I don't want to pretend that I understand this but I remember learning in a hunting safety class that legal hunting does not actually reduce the animal population because the number of animals that will die is a fixed number and if we stay within our limits then no more will die off from hunting than would have died from other causes.

I'm not sure how your comment is relevant to the above thread, but I like it and I would like to add on to it.

There was a study done looking at the impact of wolves, deer, hunters, and traffic accidents. What they found was that the smell of wolves scared off deer - thus reducing deer related traffic accidents; wolves were more effective at this than hunters killing deer.

This is a round about way of corroborating your fact, but from a different point of view.

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

#453

Post by ineedasername »

mlyle wrote: post #333
ineedasername wrote: post #304

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…

> 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. I don't think anyone has said, "fentanyl is worse for 18-44, therefore COVID is no big deal". I think the message taken was "two sources of prema…

I don't think anyone has said, "fentanyl is worse for 18-44, therefore COVID is no big deal".

My intent was to make a general statement about anchoring as a technique. But in any case, you're incorrect: my own father has made this sort of remark about opioids, and I've seen it pop up in message boards, and with other (not necessarily opioid) comparisons by folks who resist masks/social distancing/vaccination.

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

#454

Post by Manuel_D »

mcguire wrote: post #426
Manuel_D wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 600,000 more elderly Americans, or 1 of 100, have died during the Covid epidemic than would have died had the epidemic not occurred. The article does not say this. The substantial majority of Covid deaths occur among people close to or beyond the typical life expectancy [1]. It's hard to measure how many people would have died during this time frame due to complications other than Covid, and the NYT article you lin…

The "typical life expectancy" is not a terribly useful number (unless you are considering emigration). A much more useful measure is the life expectancy at a person's current age (which will always be greater than their current age). And I note it is quite easy to figure out how many people you would expect to die from complications other than Covid---as a first order approximation it will be the same as in 2019 (unl…

> And I note it is quite easy to figure out how many people you would expect to die from complications other than Covid---as a first order approximation it will be the same as in 2019 (unless you happen to know of a significant change other than COVID).

Correct, you could record the number of deaths due to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. and subtract depressions in these death categories from Covid deaths. Subtract away reductions in non-covid deaths from the Covid death toll to account for the people that would have died absent Covid.

My point is the linked NYT article didn't do this correction and it's wrong to write that they did.

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

#455

Post by alienthrowaway »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #77
ganoushoreilly wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All of the non-COVID deaths I’ve heard of among younger people ( Working from home can remove a lot of the accountability that keeps addicts in check. When your coworkers can’t see you, it’s much easier to be inebriated or otherwise suffering from addiction-related issues without feeling social pressure to correct it.

> Working from home can remove a lot of the accountability that keeps addicts in check.

COVID countermeasures reduced the number of safe recreational activities, and was a horrible for mental health overall. Additionally, America offers very little support for mental health distress, so I imagine this triple threat has been devastating to drug addicts. I'm only guessing as a teetotaler who got addicted to video games and Twitter in that time (and I used to scoff at Twitter-addicts since I had a small, curated list of accounts I followed)

[edit]A fourth factor - drug overdoses (and other "less serious" medical issues) also got less medical care because it was being hogged by respiratory patients.

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

#456

Post by chmod600 »

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.

Been a while since I read it, but I seem to remember a false sense of confidence (caused by belief in a normal distribution) being a major theme.

Regardless, we should be skeptical of the assumption that we're dealing with a normal distribution.

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

#457

Post by [deleted] »

toss1 wrote: post #450
csee wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that attorney vaxxed? > I'm not interested in that risk, and you shouldn't be either. Well, I share your anxiety about it at least. It's my biggest concern about COVID as a young person. Even 2 points is too much given the asymmetric payoff at the margin.

IIRC, he got it before the vaccines were available. I'll check the next time I chat with my friend. >>Even 2 points is too much given the asymmetric payoff at the margin. YUP!! It feels like for someone close to 100, 5 points lower would be a loss putting them suddenly below a huge group they were ahead of, and for someone close to 140, 5 points lower would be a huge step down in overall capability, even though the g…

[deleted]

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

#458

Post by MomoXenosaga »

kirse wrote: post #359
woodruffw wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mis-read my comment. The irony is that people are actually closer than ever to their family (or house-mates) due to COVID, which is pushing suicide rates down.

I did not mis-read your comment, it was a continuation of the commentary on how mandated WFH and government-enforced isolation has essentially just moved deaths from column A to column B over the long run. people are actually closer than ever to their family (or house-mates) due to COVID Yes, this is the perception for many people who have family or housemates. In the same way the rich have gotten richer, the sociall…

As always in our beloved capitalist society where we live according to the laws of the jungle:

The vulnerable and poorest suffer the most.

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

#459

Post by lkrubner »

Many people kept insisting "Not many young people are dying from Covid-19" a statement that over looked the fact that, under normal circumstances, not many young people die at all. But there was an article in the New York Times that offered these facts about people aged 20 to 40.

July, 2019: 11,000 dead

July, 2020: 16,000 dead

Both numbers are small in a country where 3 million people die each year, about 250,000 a month. But it's still a 45% increase, so that age group was the worst affected, in terms of the increase in death. The increase in the death rate of old people was not as dramatic, as older people make up the vast majority of all deaths, every year.

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

#460

Post by Tycho »

mcguire wrote: post #426
Manuel_D wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 600,000 more elderly Americans, or 1 of 100, have died during the Covid epidemic than would have died had the epidemic not occurred. The article does not say this. The substantial majority of Covid deaths occur among people close to or beyond the typical life expectancy [1]. It's hard to measure how many people would have died during this time frame due to complications other than Covid, and the NYT article you lin…

The "typical life expectancy" is not a terribly useful number (unless you are considering emigration). A much more useful measure is the life expectancy at a person's current age (which will always be greater than their current age). And I note it is quite easy to figure out how many people you would expect to die from complications other than Covid---as a first order approximation it will be the same as in 2019 (unl…

And how do those numbers compare?
Post reply on HN