I have been shouting from the roof tops that if we don't implement some sort of UBI and second string PPP program we are going to see many more people die deaths of desperation as their economic livleyhoods are stripped away.
The US, as far as I have seen, hasn't released any meaningful updates in suicide numbers for 2020, against a backdrop of suicide rates climbing since '99.
The suicide rate from 1999 until 2019 increased by 35%[1]. It's been an unaddressed growing systemic issue for a long time. As of June 23, the COVID death rate was 36 per 100,000[2] in just a handful of months. As of 2019 the average suicide rate was 14 per 100,000[1]. Unless that suicide rate does an unprecedented 250% jump it's not going to have the impact Covid has had so far, not to mention the rest of the year, which as we can see is going to be messy given the rate of increases (many of the current hotspots had a big jump in deaths per day the last couple of days).
It's tragic that suicide is increasing, it really is, but COVID is the far greater threat.
So far. Secondary effects from lockdown will continue long after the pandemic wave is over.
For example, consider how many people delayed a cancer screening or treatment in the last few months. If anyone who loses a month of life to respiratory disease is a “COVID death”, then anyone who loses a year to cancer, because they waited to treat it, is a “lockdown death”, right?
If you know people around Bergame in Italy or Mulhouse in France, please ask them how it was, how it felt. How much did the 210% and 185% excess death affected them. Will the death of one of her child and her ex-husband will make the parent living a bit north, around Strasbourg, suicide, or is will this be caused by lockdown?
What about the 26 year old dancer that will never be able to perform at the same level that she did before getting infected unless we manage to find a new medical technique to remove her lung scars? Will she work at Macdonald's now? Europe is mostly out of lockdown right now and yes, lockdown caused deaths too. But look at the addict admission to the hospital in Strsabourg/Mulhouse/Colmar and those in Britanny during the lockdown. Not having a crisis and only a lockdown did kill people, but not nearly as much as havong a crisis. In colmar, they had to close 3/4 or their bed usually used for alcoholic coma and/or OD. Im pretty sure it wasn't the case in Britanny.
Maybe you're right about the lockdown in the US though. It might have flattened the curve enough in some state and might have been useless in others, but it is obviously not working as well as it did in europe.
Im not sure how europe handled the hospitals during the shutdown. In the US, they basically stopped serving the public aside from COVID-19. I know someone who was scheduled for major heart surgery, which has been postponed indefinitely. He could easily fall into the excess mortality category. Meanwhile, hospitals are furloughing employees due lack of patients everywhere besides the hotspots.
My specific gripe is not with the lockdowns themselves, but with how the hospitals have reacted by essentially abandoning anyone who suffers from other diseasese.
Aren't those "lockdown deaths" still "Coronavirus deaths" though? The reason lockdowns have to be done is to prevent the much larger number of deaths that would occur if coronavirus is allowed to spread unhindered. So it's not clear to me why you need to make this distinction here.
Of course the distinction matters from a biological and medical point of view, but from a policy point of view all you really need to know is that if coronavirus didn't exist then those deaths wouldn't have happened.
> The reason lockdowns have to be done is to prevent the much larger number of deaths that would occur if coronavirus is allowed to spread unhindered.
This claim is not accepted by all in the medical or scientific community. This is just the line from the epidemiologists who have the most influence, and it has been amplified by the media into some sort of unquestionable creed. My guess is the damage that these epidemiologists have done is going to be far worse than the disease itself. If you can't see that their over-simplified non-linear models are essentially just guesses too, then you are missing a big part of the picture.
Nothing is ever "accepted by all in the medical or scientific community", that's an impossible standard. Of course the models that we have aren't perfect and there can (and will) be mistakes, but most of the community agrees that they are the best we have at the moment.
I'm not sure what you mean by "over-simplified non-linear models", please elaborate.
I would say in general though that the problem is not the models but the parameters - this is such a new virus that modellers have to make various assumptions about things that we can't possibly know yet.
No lockdown => hospitals overwhelmed => people can't get care they need or people avoid hospitals to avoid getting sick => excess deaths
Lockdown => hospitals less overwhelmed => people avoid hospitals due to lockdown or to avoid getting sick => excess deaths (but less than the no lockdown scenario)
Here in Austin our medical community is practically begging us to take better precautions because our hospital system is starting to hit capacity due to the second wave we're staring down [1]. Saying it's not 'accepted' in the medical community seems wrong.
>No lockdown => hospitals overwhelmed => people can't get care they need or people avoid hospitals to avoid getting sick => excess deaths
>Lockdown => hospitals less overwhelmed => people avoid hospitals due to lockdown or to avoid getting sick => excess deaths (but less than the no lockdown scenario)
Right, but eventually as things taper off there's a crossover point where the first option will have less deaths going forward. Where that crossover point is the point of contention.
Well, no, because we see what happens when we try and go over the crossover point here in Austin. COVID-19 rates go up, hospitals become overwhelmed again and then people avoid hospitals or the people that need to go can't.
Which then means you have to go into lockdown again while people yell at you for going into lockdown not understanding that the alternative was made nonviable due to them not taking basic precautions.
>Aren't those "lockdown deaths" still "Coronavirus deaths" though?
Depends on the intended use of the information.
Calling them coronavirus deaths and then turning around and using the size of that number as an reason to continue lockdown would be foolhardy at best.
If you're trying to evaluate the impact of the virus on X or you're writing a passage for a history textbook years later I see no problem lumping them in together.
> Calling them coronavirus deaths and then turning around and using the size of that number as an reason to continue lockdown would be foolhardy at best.
Sure, but I don't think anybody serious is doing that. Obviously people are considering things like this in their models.
But the total number of coronavirus deaths is still useful when trying to measure the effect of a failure to contain the virus. So for example when you want to compare countries/states that locked down early and effectively to countries/states that waited too long, saw a massive spike in deaths and then had to lock down even harder. In that case you don't really care what caused the deaths, you just care about the fact that it appears that you could have avoided them with better policy.
It would be nice if we counted COVID-19 deaths the way we count flu deaths, which is generally using the "excess deaths" figure. Why some states would go with "50% of excess deaths" or "65% of excess deaths" seems like an odd choice. Are there non-political reasons for doing that?
It seems that we are much more generous in how we count flu deaths, so that 15,620[0] confirmed tracked deaths in the most recent flu season ends up as an estimated 42,000.
All the comparisons I've seen this year have been using the 24,000-62,000 flu estimate uncritically when comparing to COVID-19, but apples to apples is apparently 15,620 for flu and
132,056 for COVID-19[1].
Perhaps flu-like estimates will come later, since the CDC tends to wait until the end of flu seasons to release those numbers. We're clearly nowhere near the end of COVID-19 season.
We have a very long history with the flu, and know that historically, the season ends around March every year.
COVID-19 is new, and was barely getting started in March. Despite early claims that it would definitely taper off in the summer, apparently based on the fact that the flu does, it is not tapering off at all. We have no idea when COVID-19 will taper off, or if it will before herd immunity is reached (with or without a vaccine).
So we don't know yet when the end will be, and they have different dates because they are different viruses.
The reaction to this pandemic is in fact killing a great many people. In a normal flu season the whole country doesn’t lose its marbles a̶n̶d̶ ̶d̶e̶s̶c̶e̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶o̶ ̶g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶a̶l̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶o̶s̶.
Where does this us-vs-them, "descend into general chaos" interpretation come from aside from petty identity politics (which I give HN users the benefit of the doubt about)? To be clear: I mean as opposed to giving people the benefit of the doubt - that people are, in general, acting on best information and that any urgency you perceive is an understandable result of it being a life and death situation. "Descending" into "chaos" is such a common attack on - what? People buying too much toilet paper? Orders to wear masks? It seems so unnecessarily hyperdramatic and divisive.
Edit: For context, I admit the devastation to life from both "sides". But I have no strong conclusion either way - I can't figure out if we're erring on too much lockdown or too little lockdown so far.
This appears to just be articles about examples of the harm of the lockdown, which isn't what I asked about, nor did I deny it. Another person could just as easily post examples of the direct harm of the virus and call it "descending into chaos" because we didn't lock down enough. The point is to be rational.
I don't see how an excess death caused indirectly by the virus is different to one caused directly, when measuring broadly (ie not for epidemiological purposes).
Those people died because of the virus, and the cost of the virus in lives should be measured that way.
One of the important questions that comes up with this data is whether excessive fear of Covid-19 is leading to many other unnecessary deaths. It is not clear what percent of these 35% would fall into that category.
I wonder how officials record deaths where the person was just found dead. Do they try to figure out the causes of death? It was reported in New York City that the rate at which firefighters and paramedics were finding dead people at home had increased by 10x over normal rates. They were finding 200 or more people daily.
Unfortunately, in many places tests were not being performed as part of the autopsy, so to understand how many of those were Covid19 deaths, researchers will have to use a model derived from known cases and causes of death.
I've been saying this since the start. Unless we lockdown for 2 years, 100% of people would negatively be affected.
If we lockdown for 2 years 99.5% of people would be negatively affected.
If we didn't lockdown at all, 0.5% of people would negatively be affected.
This is basic statistics to me. But our leaders have never taken a statistics class and merely relied on physician testimonials. Who are obviously not taking into consideration big picture problems.
How on earth does a knowledge of basic statistics get you in possession of such dramatic and specific numbers? The way you've written, it looks like you're practicing clairvoyance.
Which Country went to early lockdown and had hospitals overrun? Like, none at all, the countries with overrun hospitals were locking down when situations was already almost there.
Wuhan locked down before hospitals were overrun - there were only a handful of deaths by Jan 23. The lagging nature of cases, severe cases, and deaths means locking down needs to be well in advance of the spike to be completely effective.
Didn't they pretended nothing going on for a long time? Like the doctors were warning about issue and were persecuted while authorities basically pretended nothing is going on?
1) In Wuhan, when the primary care taker(s) of a child or a disabled or elderly person suddenly become hospitalized and there's no opportunity to arrange backup care, there were many stories of when dependent is found deceased later.
2) Sometimes, a month or two after someone 'fully recovers' from Covid-19, they experience a blood clot. If that clot results in a stroke or heart attack...
3) Sometimes a Covid-19 survivor has organ damage significant enough to be on a transplant list. Due to fewer car accidents, the organ supply isn't what it used to be in the BC era...
Problem is that inactivity is also known to cause blood clots and subsequent problems, hence deep vein thrombosis being linked with long distance flights. What happens during lockdown, people stop moving about and spend all day sitting at home.
I think we need to be apply critical thinking to claims of the form, "some one recovered fully but then was struck down by covid19 a second time". That can easily be a correlation/causation fallacy.
According to the article, there are 2 types of excess deaths:
- the virus can also cause death by exacerbating underlying health issues; the body’s immune system is weakened while fighting off the illness.
- the sudden emergence and rapid spread of the disease overwhelmed critical care units when the virus was at its peak, reducing the amount of care any individual patient could receive.
And the argument of "35% excess deaths not caused by COVID-19" is perhaps technically correct due to the reasons above, however, those are indirect deaths that had the root cause of SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus. Notice the difference between COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2? The former is the disease, the latter is the virus.
As Dr. Mike Hansen said in a few of his autopsy report review videos he made in his YouTube channel[1], there are very few direct cause of death in the death certificate he signed and issued for his ICU patients, most related to blood clots and lack of oxygen but the common indirect cause is the SARS-CoV-2. In other words, if it weren't for the coronavirus infection, these deaths could either be prevented or delayed.
So I think it's more nuanced than simply saying we are attributing 35% the excess deaths to COVID-19 whereas these are indirectly caused by SAR-CoV-2 viral outbreak.
No. You are not representing the article or the study accurately. There are many other reasons for excess deaths than the two you mentioned.
From the article:
>there were 96% more diabetes-related deaths than experts predicted. For heart disease, the figure was 89%; for Alzheimer’s disease, it was 64%; and for stroke, it was 35%.
>As well as people not being able to get the necessary treatment due to hospitals being overloaded, the study authors also speculate that people may have stayed at home due to the virus despite experiencing worsening symptoms of another condition they may have had.
>They also believe that the pandemic’s effects on people’s mental health may have played a part.
>As Prof. Woolf notes: “We can’t forget about mental health. A number of people struggling with depression, addiction, and very difficult economic conditions caused by lockdowns may have become increasingly desperate, and some may have died by suicide. People addicted to opioids and other drugs may have overdosed.”
Just on the heart disease alone, I understand these deaths were due to the virus causing clots in the arteries near the heart. That seems directly related to the virus.
At this point it seems like basically everything and anything is being attributed to this virus, often without any kind of study or robust evidence.
Occam's Razor can help here. We know that there are treatments for these ailments that can help people. We know these treatments stopped due to lockdown and people being afraid to go to hospitals. We know this must, but implication, increase deaths from these ailments.
The alternative explanation is far more complex, actually it's of unbounded complexity because as far as I know there isn't any clear known mechanism of action that shows how this type of virus can cause all these different kinds of problems. Is there even a robust set of studies that show how this type of virus causes blood clots? As far as I know there is some evidence that blood thinners can help a bit with flu, sometimes, so it's not entirely implausible, but I think it's also unknown what exactly happens there and why. And people keep saying this virus is totally unlike flu so that similarity should maybe be discarded.
The mechanism of action behind the broad symptoms we see is actually reasonably straightforward- the ace2 receptor the virus uses to enter cells is everywhere in your body. In vitro, they replicate in pancreatic cells and intestinal cells, which lends a mechanistic explanation for the link to gastrointestinal distress and diabetes seen in correlative findings. Heart muscle also has high concentrations of the ACE2 receptor. One of the mechanistic hypothesis for clotting [0] proposed is that the complement system and immune cascades trigger clots, since they saw evidence of the virus binding to an element in the complement cascade. This could turn out to be entirely wrong of course, but that's a hint at the other key aspect of this that allows varied results - your immune system can react poorly and is capable of screwing up in fascinating and varied ways. It could be the virus killing pancreatic cells, or an autoimmune response triggered by the virus that causes pancreatic cell death since the virus infects them and marks them for destruction.
Are these the driving forces behind increased clots etc? Maybe not. Maybe its contributing equally with people staying at home, or maybe not at all. But the mechanistic reasons for the broad symptoms are there and they're relatively straightforward, driven by the ability of the virus to infect lots of different cells and the variability of the human immune system
Went through a few years of suffering minor strokes, only finally got stabilized back in January.
Had several bad scares that I didn’t go in that I really should have.
Finally had a bad enough scare that I went to ER.
Apparently heart isn’t doing great, or heading in that direction. I was stable enough to go home. With strict instructs to get additional testing in day’s.
Yet I’m Having major problems getting access to a cardiologist due to everything.
So yea, i lucked out in getting stable right before things shut down. But having a seriously hard time getting any follow up care.
So at a certain point this shutdown will kill me. And I’m fairly young.
So I have to balance virus risk with the more likely death due to lack of care.
If you find yourself needing to go in again (or able to get the follow up appointment) I wouldn't hesitate to go in.
At least in my area, hospitals are nearly over-the-top in terms of separating people who have symptoms, going in for tearing, and those going in for anything else. Separate entrances, separate waiting areas, no visitors, multiple tests required prior to non emergency treatments, etc.
Of course, if you can't find a specialist at all, that is a very different story.
This is known to be happening in the UK too. The expectation is for thousands of 'excess' cancer deaths due to reduced cancer-related medical services.
What’s sad is it took 3 years to find out I have a clotting disorder.
Despite many trips to Er and doctors complaining of stroke symptoms.
A simple blood thinner resolved so many problems for me.
Turns out there’s a big range of clot sizes. From micro ones that have very brief problems, to the sort that kill you in minutes. Hospitals can only really catch them when they are about to kill you, or just after.
Right. May have been. That's why I commented elsewhere about how we are really unable to figure out what percent of this 35% is actually caused by Covid-19, and what percent is caused by the shutdown or people being overly fearful.
>As well as people not being able to get the necessary treatment due to hospitals being overloaded, the study authors also speculate that people may have stayed at home due to the virus despite experiencing worsening symptoms of another condition they may have had.
OK, I read this as two separate things that should not be described in the same "35%" statistic.
In the former, the virus caused hospital overload specifically due to rising cases of the virus, or virus-related exacerbation of underlying disease.
In the latter, people's perception of the threat of hospitals, which were hotbeds for the virus, caused them not to seek treatment in hospitals.
Case #1 is attributable to the virus. Case #2 is indirect, but I'd argue that those same people would have also been somewhat impacted given that A) it's possible the hospital they avoided was overloaded and B) it's possible the hospital they avoided was a hotbed where they could have contracted the virus. There's also that C) they could have received successful treatment, but how can we measure that? For (A) and (B), the outcome was still death.
For (B), the outcome is not necessarily death. Getting Covid-19 is not an automatic death sentence. Better to risk getting it and have a chance of living than stay home and die of a stroke.
True, the patient could receive treatment. The risk, given a pre-existing condition, to become infected with the virus is still an additional burden, but perhaps not death. Conversely, some number of people with pre-existing conditions, who chose to avoid hospitals and who did not die as an outcome, could have also died had they visited.
I imagine that the people who chose to stay home are in a set where it wasn't obvious that staying home meant death. Thus, I think it was a good bet given what we know about coronavirus complications, spreadability, and virulence.
Since all of these things are comorbidities to covid, it sure seems possible that they just tested negative, despite having the disease. 35% seems to be about the false negative rate.
Maybe the author is forgetting that this is the reason people wanted to track excess deaths in the first place.
Nor can you assume that all of these deaths are simply undetected Covid-19 deaths. We simply don't know what percent of the 35% are caused by Covid-19 and what percent are caused by the lockdown and/or people being too scared to seek treatment. All we know is that there is an additional 35% in excess deaths.
well, there are lots of diseases that aren't comorbid with covid, and the author pointed to no spikes in deaths from those diseases.
Suicide is not responsible for any appreciable fraction of that 35%. The article doesn't mention suicide at all, and it would be so extraordinarily anomalous if suicides were suddenly on par with heart disease that that would be the only possible title of this article if they were.
it should be possible to actually verify these speculations? Many nations locked down completely, but the virus was still mostly confined in some regions, so by comparing the regional excess deaths with the virus prevalence it should be possible to discriminate between deaths caused directly and indirectly from the virus and deats caused by the lockdown itself. Anedoctaly there are nations in Europe that are/were in lockdown and see no excess mortality at all.
Lockdowns and fear-spreading are a political decisions, regardless to if we judge them to be wrong or not. So, if people don't go to the doctor, that's because they are worried from what they watched on television. If hospitals collapse, that's because they are either not prepared, or have lots of staff in quarantine. That's not because of a virus, but because of how humans were prepared and chose to deal with the situation.
This framing where any action that takes virus seriously is talked about as "fear" is quite manipulative political action too. Let's not pretend the "whether we judge it right or wrong" somehow removes it.
So is attributing overloaded hospitals to "lots of staff in quarantine" given how it looked like in Italy or Spain or New York.
The article is not what I expected. The 35% are deaths caused indirectly by the disease, not the results of things like change of behavior or economic downturns.
The 35% are from people who supposedly recovered from Covid-19 but died later from complications or a weakened body. I still would call that Covid-19 deaths.
In the same way that if you fall, break your leg, and later die from infection, we can still say that the fall caused your death, even though what sealed your fate is a bacteria and not mechanical damage.
> Moreover, restrictions imposed by the pandemic (eg, stay-at-home orders) could claim lives indirectly through delayed care for acute emergencies, exacerbations of chronic diseases, and psychological distress (eg, drug overdoses).
Summary:
>Large increases in mortality from heart disease, diabetes, and other diseases were observed. Further investigation is required to determine the extent to which these trends represent nonrespiratory manifestations of COVID-19 or secondary pandemic mortality caused by disruptions in society that diminished or delayed access to health care and the social determinants of health (eg, jobs, income, food security).
You are referring to the article written about the paper, whcih is engaging, at best, in wishful thinking, and at worst, propaganda.
A doubling in the number of deaths associated with "diabetes" is absolutely not consistent with not seeing a doctor for your diabetes for 4 months. It's not like you aren't checking your blood sugar or aren't getting insulin.
No, indeed the only reasonable explanation for the sudden doubling of diabetes related deaths, is that they are actually the result of covid. 35% is not inconsistent with the false negative rates on testing, which is precisely the reason that we are measuring excess deaths as an estimate of the number of people killed by covid.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadYou can't say this. You haven't looked at the stats. England had a lockdown. What stats are you using for the UK?
The US, as far as I have seen, hasn't released any meaningful updates in suicide numbers for 2020, against a backdrop of suicide rates climbing since '99.
It's tragic that suicide is increasing, it really is, but COVID is the far greater threat.
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db362.htm
[2]https://www.statista.com/chart/21170/coronavirus-death-rate-...
For example, consider how many people delayed a cancer screening or treatment in the last few months. If anyone who loses a month of life to respiratory disease is a “COVID death”, then anyone who loses a year to cancer, because they waited to treat it, is a “lockdown death”, right?
What about the 26 year old dancer that will never be able to perform at the same level that she did before getting infected unless we manage to find a new medical technique to remove her lung scars? Will she work at Macdonald's now? Europe is mostly out of lockdown right now and yes, lockdown caused deaths too. But look at the addict admission to the hospital in Strsabourg/Mulhouse/Colmar and those in Britanny during the lockdown. Not having a crisis and only a lockdown did kill people, but not nearly as much as havong a crisis. In colmar, they had to close 3/4 or their bed usually used for alcoholic coma and/or OD. Im pretty sure it wasn't the case in Britanny.
Maybe you're right about the lockdown in the US though. It might have flattened the curve enough in some state and might have been useless in others, but it is obviously not working as well as it did in europe.
My specific gripe is not with the lockdowns themselves, but with how the hospitals have reacted by essentially abandoning anyone who suffers from other diseasese.
Of course the distinction matters from a biological and medical point of view, but from a policy point of view all you really need to know is that if coronavirus didn't exist then those deaths wouldn't have happened.
This claim is not accepted by all in the medical or scientific community. This is just the line from the epidemiologists who have the most influence, and it has been amplified by the media into some sort of unquestionable creed. My guess is the damage that these epidemiologists have done is going to be far worse than the disease itself. If you can't see that their over-simplified non-linear models are essentially just guesses too, then you are missing a big part of the picture.
I'm not sure what you mean by "over-simplified non-linear models", please elaborate.
I would say in general though that the problem is not the models but the parameters - this is such a new virus that modellers have to make various assumptions about things that we can't possibly know yet.
No lockdown => hospitals overwhelmed => people can't get care they need or people avoid hospitals to avoid getting sick => excess deaths
Lockdown => hospitals less overwhelmed => people avoid hospitals due to lockdown or to avoid getting sick => excess deaths (but less than the no lockdown scenario)
Here in Austin our medical community is practically begging us to take better precautions because our hospital system is starting to hit capacity due to the second wave we're staring down [1]. Saying it's not 'accepted' in the medical community seems wrong.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv4kCwo1JMc
>Lockdown => hospitals less overwhelmed => people avoid hospitals due to lockdown or to avoid getting sick => excess deaths (but less than the no lockdown scenario)
Right, but eventually as things taper off there's a crossover point where the first option will have less deaths going forward. Where that crossover point is the point of contention.
Which then means you have to go into lockdown again while people yell at you for going into lockdown not understanding that the alternative was made nonviable due to them not taking basic precautions.
(Genuinely asking, since I wasn't aware epidemiology wasn't a science.)
Depends on the intended use of the information.
Calling them coronavirus deaths and then turning around and using the size of that number as an reason to continue lockdown would be foolhardy at best.
If you're trying to evaluate the impact of the virus on X or you're writing a passage for a history textbook years later I see no problem lumping them in together.
Sure, but I don't think anybody serious is doing that. Obviously people are considering things like this in their models.
But the total number of coronavirus deaths is still useful when trying to measure the effect of a failure to contain the virus. So for example when you want to compare countries/states that locked down early and effectively to countries/states that waited too long, saw a massive spike in deaths and then had to lock down even harder. In that case you don't really care what caused the deaths, you just care about the fact that it appears that you could have avoided them with better policy.
All the comparisons I've seen this year have been using the 24,000-62,000 flu estimate uncritically when comparing to COVID-19, but apples to apples is apparently 15,620 for flu and 132,056 for COVID-19[1].
Perhaps flu-like estimates will come later, since the CDC tends to wait until the end of flu seasons to release those numbers. We're clearly nowhere near the end of COVID-19 season.
[0] https://news.yahoo.com/flu-deaths-were-counted-covid-0534499...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/case...
COVID-19 is new, and was barely getting started in March. Despite early claims that it would definitely taper off in the summer, apparently based on the fact that the flu does, it is not tapering off at all. We have no idea when COVID-19 will taper off, or if it will before herd immunity is reached (with or without a vaccine).
So we don't know yet when the end will be, and they have different dates because they are different viruses.
Edit: For context, I admit the devastation to life from both "sides". But I have no strong conclusion either way - I can't figure out if we're erring on too much lockdown or too little lockdown so far.
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1931
https://agoodwar.com/the-ban-on-elective-procedures-is-killi...
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/a-tale-of-two-epidemics-...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/295664
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/14/isolated-uk-...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/13/hospit...
https://www.businessinsider.com/school-closures-may-not-prev...
But in many parts of the country (mostly the parts where HN users don't live, naturally), "general chaos" is already not hyperbole: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/upshot/murders-rising-cri...
Those people died because of the virus, and the cost of the virus in lives should be measured that way.
Does that mean the other 65% of excess deaths were or "may have been" due to COVID?
There's so many "may" and non specific statements, etc that I'm not at all sure what it is it is saying.
If we lockdown for 2 years 99.5% of people would be negatively affected.
If we didn't lockdown at all, 0.5% of people would negatively be affected.
This is basic statistics to me. But our leaders have never taken a statistics class and merely relied on physician testimonials. Who are obviously not taking into consideration big picture problems.
This is why statisticians take more than "basic statistics".
1) In Wuhan, when the primary care taker(s) of a child or a disabled or elderly person suddenly become hospitalized and there's no opportunity to arrange backup care, there were many stories of when dependent is found deceased later.
2) Sometimes, a month or two after someone 'fully recovers' from Covid-19, they experience a blood clot. If that clot results in a stroke or heart attack...
3) Sometimes a Covid-19 survivor has organ damage significant enough to be on a transplant list. Due to fewer car accidents, the organ supply isn't what it used to be in the BC era...
I think we need to be apply critical thinking to claims of the form, "some one recovered fully but then was struck down by covid19 a second time". That can easily be a correlation/causation fallacy.
- the virus can also cause death by exacerbating underlying health issues; the body’s immune system is weakened while fighting off the illness.
- the sudden emergence and rapid spread of the disease overwhelmed critical care units when the virus was at its peak, reducing the amount of care any individual patient could receive.
And the argument of "35% excess deaths not caused by COVID-19" is perhaps technically correct due to the reasons above, however, those are indirect deaths that had the root cause of SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus. Notice the difference between COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2? The former is the disease, the latter is the virus.
As Dr. Mike Hansen said in a few of his autopsy report review videos he made in his YouTube channel[1], there are very few direct cause of death in the death certificate he signed and issued for his ICU patients, most related to blood clots and lack of oxygen but the common indirect cause is the SARS-CoV-2. In other words, if it weren't for the coronavirus infection, these deaths could either be prevented or delayed.
So I think it's more nuanced than simply saying we are attributing 35% the excess deaths to COVID-19 whereas these are indirectly caused by SAR-CoV-2 viral outbreak.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6h8TIxeg1g
From the article:
>there were 96% more diabetes-related deaths than experts predicted. For heart disease, the figure was 89%; for Alzheimer’s disease, it was 64%; and for stroke, it was 35%.
>As well as people not being able to get the necessary treatment due to hospitals being overloaded, the study authors also speculate that people may have stayed at home due to the virus despite experiencing worsening symptoms of another condition they may have had.
>They also believe that the pandemic’s effects on people’s mental health may have played a part.
>As Prof. Woolf notes: “We can’t forget about mental health. A number of people struggling with depression, addiction, and very difficult economic conditions caused by lockdowns may have become increasingly desperate, and some may have died by suicide. People addicted to opioids and other drugs may have overdosed.”
Occam's Razor can help here. We know that there are treatments for these ailments that can help people. We know these treatments stopped due to lockdown and people being afraid to go to hospitals. We know this must, but implication, increase deaths from these ailments.
The alternative explanation is far more complex, actually it's of unbounded complexity because as far as I know there isn't any clear known mechanism of action that shows how this type of virus can cause all these different kinds of problems. Is there even a robust set of studies that show how this type of virus causes blood clots? As far as I know there is some evidence that blood thinners can help a bit with flu, sometimes, so it's not entirely implausible, but I think it's also unknown what exactly happens there and why. And people keep saying this virus is totally unlike flu so that similarity should maybe be discarded.
Are these the driving forces behind increased clots etc? Maybe not. Maybe its contributing equally with people staying at home, or maybe not at all. But the mechanistic reasons for the broad symptoms are there and they're relatively straightforward, driven by the ability of the virus to infect lots of different cells and the variability of the human immune system
[0]https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2020/07/what-is-known-ab...
Had several bad scares that I didn’t go in that I really should have.
Finally had a bad enough scare that I went to ER. Apparently heart isn’t doing great, or heading in that direction. I was stable enough to go home. With strict instructs to get additional testing in day’s.
Yet I’m Having major problems getting access to a cardiologist due to everything.
So yea, i lucked out in getting stable right before things shut down. But having a seriously hard time getting any follow up care.
So at a certain point this shutdown will kill me. And I’m fairly young.
So I have to balance virus risk with the more likely death due to lack of care.
At least in my area, hospitals are nearly over-the-top in terms of separating people who have symptoms, going in for tearing, and those going in for anything else. Separate entrances, separate waiting areas, no visitors, multiple tests required prior to non emergency treatments, etc.
Of course, if you can't find a specialist at all, that is a very different story.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/health-53310007/they-paused-my...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53300784
Despite many trips to Er and doctors complaining of stroke symptoms.
A simple blood thinner resolved so many problems for me.
Turns out there’s a big range of clot sizes. From micro ones that have very brief problems, to the sort that kill you in minutes. Hospitals can only really catch them when they are about to kill you, or just after.
OK, I read this as two separate things that should not be described in the same "35%" statistic.
In the former, the virus caused hospital overload specifically due to rising cases of the virus, or virus-related exacerbation of underlying disease.
In the latter, people's perception of the threat of hospitals, which were hotbeds for the virus, caused them not to seek treatment in hospitals.
Case #1 is attributable to the virus. Case #2 is indirect, but I'd argue that those same people would have also been somewhat impacted given that A) it's possible the hospital they avoided was overloaded and B) it's possible the hospital they avoided was a hotbed where they could have contracted the virus. There's also that C) they could have received successful treatment, but how can we measure that? For (A) and (B), the outcome was still death.
I imagine that the people who chose to stay home are in a set where it wasn't obvious that staying home meant death. Thus, I think it was a good bet given what we know about coronavirus complications, spreadability, and virulence.
Maybe the author is forgetting that this is the reason people wanted to track excess deaths in the first place.
Nor can you assume that all of these deaths are simply undetected Covid-19 deaths. We simply don't know what percent of the 35% are caused by Covid-19 and what percent are caused by the lockdown and/or people being too scared to seek treatment. All we know is that there is an additional 35% in excess deaths.
Suicide is not responsible for any appreciable fraction of that 35%. The article doesn't mention suicide at all, and it would be so extraordinarily anomalous if suicides were suddenly on par with heart disease that that would be the only possible title of this article if they were.
Also, I already quoted it above. You said all of the things mentioned were comorbidities. They aren't.
So is attributing overloaded hospitals to "lots of staff in quarantine" given how it looked like in Italy or Spain or New York.
It's not any longer and written in clearer language.
The paper simply summarizes the reported causes of excess death.
The 35% are from people who supposedly recovered from Covid-19 but died later from complications or a weakened body. I still would call that Covid-19 deaths.
In the same way that if you fall, break your leg, and later die from infection, we can still say that the fall caused your death, even though what sealed your fate is a bacteria and not mechanical damage.
Third sentence:
> Moreover, restrictions imposed by the pandemic (eg, stay-at-home orders) could claim lives indirectly through delayed care for acute emergencies, exacerbations of chronic diseases, and psychological distress (eg, drug overdoses).
Summary:
>Large increases in mortality from heart disease, diabetes, and other diseases were observed. Further investigation is required to determine the extent to which these trends represent nonrespiratory manifestations of COVID-19 or secondary pandemic mortality caused by disruptions in society that diminished or delayed access to health care and the social determinants of health (eg, jobs, income, food security).
A doubling in the number of deaths associated with "diabetes" is absolutely not consistent with not seeing a doctor for your diabetes for 4 months. It's not like you aren't checking your blood sugar or aren't getting insulin.
No, indeed the only reasonable explanation for the sudden doubling of diabetes related deaths, is that they are actually the result of covid. 35% is not inconsistent with the false negative rates on testing, which is precisely the reason that we are measuring excess deaths as an estimate of the number of people killed by covid.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768086