Why would a site available in the EU be obligated to annoy everyone with cookie consent banners. Many probably do, but it’s laziness on their part, but there’s no legal obligation to do so.
IANAL, but I doubt that sites not available in the EU are legally obligated to annoy non-EU visitors with cookie consent banners? Of course, it's easier to annoy everyone, but if you can block EU visitors based on their IP you can also show the cookie consent banner only for these IPs?
Because the banners are targeted at EU citizens, not people geographically within the EU. You're required to show the banners to e.g. EU citizens living in the US.
ETA: under GDPR, blocking the EU geographically (e.g. via GeoIP), in combination with requiring user registrations to specify that they’re not EU citizens, would be considered a “good-faith effort” to avoid collecting the data of EU citizens.
Ok, that's pretty absurd and technically impossible, but blocking users from the EU, as many US sites do, does not "fix" for this issue, because EU users living in the US will be able to use the site without getting a cookie banner.
Well, actually what I do almost always is click reject all on the GDPR ones, then tab over to the legitimate interest tab and object to all of that too. I can't speak for the behaviours of others.
If you have a real legitimate interest, you don't need my consent, so I feel entirely justified in objecting to their fake-ass "legitimate interest" (i.e. please let us do what we want).
To send a signal to the EU that US based web sites wish to continue to steal their users' PII and sell it to whomever they wish, without users having to give their consent, because that's how you make money when you don't have good, quality product.
>Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
So he sees the data for non elderly people, because those are the people who have his company's plans. So he doesn't have the data to compare against to say elderly people aren't dying at higher rates because they aren't his customers
Because the quoted source is literally making the comparison, which I am saying is incorrect because his data is biased. Please reread the piece I quoted to see the comparison
>that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64”
He also, in the article, mentions that he is looking at other companies in the market. "We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica".
Anywho without more info about what access to data he is making his observations on, we're just speculating. Definitely can't say he is factually wrong with the vague and open bits of info from the article. It's just quotes that could mean almost anything.
I think the $100bn number does not refer to the company revenue. According to the company, in 2016 revenue was close to $2bn [1]. It may instead refer to total assets under administration (which was $74bn in 2016, according to the same source).
How many new young customers do they have? Maybe more people than before think about getting a life insurance and for whatever reason the more "fragile" ones are getting one.
Big employers in the US offer group life insurance to their employees without the need to opt in. Of course they have opt in add ons to increase the coverage, but in any case if you are employed and you die (knock wood) the insurance company’s phone will ring.
These are most likely group life policies where the employer pays the premiums for a base amount for all employees. Since there is no charge to the employee for the base coverage, most would accept the coverage.
If the employee base changed it could end up being unrepresentative of the broader population, but it's hard to imagine what that might be. Healthier people quit? Healthier people left Indiana? A competitor insurance company signed all the healthier groups?
He is not saying that elderly people aren’t dying. He’s saying elderly people are not in his sample set. In other words, you read this incorrectly. Also, you do not justify your claim of bias.
I dunno what the disconnect is but you may be the only one struggling with the meaning behind the words. I don't see him referring to the death rate of people outside 18-64 at all.
You could say his information is biased because it is limited to folks that have insurance through his company, but he's up front about that.
Do you think he's saying elderly people aren't dying? Because that's what those precise words would mean when you take them out of context. In context, it's clear that he's not talking about elderly people at all.
I've had to chop up the quote to point out the exact part I take issue with. The entire quote is a comparison of age groups, of which he does not appear to have data for.
Also as others have mentioned, this part may have been added by the reporter who definitely doesn't cite Amy source for the comparison. Either option equates to poor reporting.
As others point out here, this is a literary construction flagging that in his specific context, he is not referencing old people. He is making the very point that he is above accused of not making. Just as if I were to chop the quote in your sentence “this part may have been added by a reporter” (which is not a self-reference to your own quote possibly having been edited by a reporter), the context is important. The reporting here is causal but being able to interpret such statements is part of basic reading comprehension.
It is a literary construction that makes the sentence contain incorrect information. A correct statement would have not mentioned elderly people at all because they are not included in the data:
"There has been an increase in deaths of working age 18-64 year olds."
Sure. Is this true:
(WHERE 18 <= age <= 64) is the same as
(WHERE 18 <= age <= 64 AND NOT 64 < AGE)
? This is what he's saying. It's emphatic, not pedantic to make such a point.
Humans are not programs or computers and language is inherently fuzzy. Having the added statement about the elderly implies they are making a statement about elderly deaths. There is no reason to include the statement as it makes the reporting unclear. This is a problem with reporting on data and science, through the game of telephone things are added and removed and meaning is added or lost.
Simply stating that deaths are up for working age people is more than sufficient and avoids adding unclear information. There is no reason to make any statement about any group that is not included in the data.
If I have data on goose deaths in Florida, I wouldn't say "goose deaths are up in Florida, but not because they're dying in New Jersey!"
I simply cannot make a statement on New Jersey goose mortality because my data says nothing about New Jersey
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 who are dying (to account for this increase), but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
Plus, he actually could say "that elderly people aren't dying at the same rate" in his dataset and be technically correct. The elderly are not part of his dataset, so it's vacuously true.
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.
What claim do you believe is being made that utilizes this source in a biased way? It seems to me that in his remarks he was pretty clear about this data applying to the vertical of participants in employer plans, in a specific age group.
I don’t think it’s any secret that the last two years have been poor for people’s mental & physical health. It stands to reason that we’re going to be feeling the consequences of the pandemic & pandemic mitigation efforts for quite some time.
My interpretation is that this guy runs an insurance company who insures working age people through their employers. That is the source of the data, so he is missing data on elderly people
Yet he makes a claim that the people he does not have data on are dying at a lower rate than the people he does have data on. This makes no sense, as you can't make a comparison when you simply don't have data on the group you're comparing against
I have it quoted in multiple comments here, including my top comment. Here it is again:
>Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
Here is the specific part I take issue with:
>it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people
I think you’re misinterpreting his statement. He isn’t making a claim about elderly death rates. He’s saying the pandemic (both the disease and other effects) is affecting a younger, working cohort as well, based on their available data.
I believe where you are interpreting it one way and the rest of us are interpreting it another is perhaps due to missing the quotation marks.
...deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18...
Davidson, the CEO in question, directly said "huge, huge numbers" and "primarily working-age people 18..." in his address. However the author of the article, Margaret Menge, added the "that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying" piece.
Essentially Margaret, as explained in another comment, used a literary construction to tie the quotes together. The sentence is being used to convey that contrary to the popular narrative that the pandemic is only killing the elderly, here we have evidence that it's affecting other cohorts as well.
If that is true, them this changes the meaning of the quotes. In my opinion this is just as bad because the entire article centers around these claims and she is adding claims that her source did not make.
Well how they are distributed is also important IMO. If you kill one young person for every 10 elderly you save that's a clear tradeoff situation. I don't know what the right answer is of course but it's not as though lockdowns are cost free as some have suggested.
Keep in mind, it isn’t obvious that killing more of their parents and grandparents would lower deaths of despair in youth — Covid itself is (IMO) depressing, not just lockdown measures.
It's more complicated than that. Suicide rates for under 35 males were significantly higher.
Per the original source data from the CDC [1]:
> For males, the age-adjusted suicide
rate dropped 2%, from 22.4 per 100,000
in 2019 to 21.9 in 2020. Rates for
males in age groups 10–14 and 25–34
increased by 13% and 5%, respectively,
although only the 5% increase for those
aged 25–34 (from 28.0 to 29.3) was
significant. Rates for males aged 45–54,
55–64, and 65–74 declined (Figure 3).
Although essentially unchanged from
2019, the rate for males aged 75 and over
was the highest of all age groups at 40.2
in 2020.
For example, if those disabilities are due to long COVID, then that would indicate that the cure is indeed not worse than the problem itself, but rather that the problem is even worse than we thought.
Why is the total deaths up? Are cancer deaths going up because the system is stressed by COVID? Are the people who are dying people who had COVID, or people who didn't?
Are people dying because they have more stress and less exercise? Are people dying because of the restrictions due to the pandemic? Are people dying because they have lost their job and no longer have access to health care? Are people dying because of hidden effects of a vaccine? Are people dying because social isolation causes follow-on problems?
That's not even to talk about Fentanyl and meth addiction, as mentioned above, which seems to be a confounding factor that started before COVID.
Perhaps there is a complex interaction of issues that will lead everyone to their own interpretation.
This data doesn't tell us any of those things. And it certainly doesn't say, one way or the other, if the cure was worse than the disease, or even what cure we are talking about.
I don't think they provided enough information to say either way. My gut hunch is that Covid and delayed health care are involved but I don't have a guess as to what degree.
It’s a mixed bag there; a lot of despair can come from being forced to be around people who you don’t like. Working from home has definitely given me a new perspective and I don’t dread working the way I used to. To paraphrase Sartre, sometimes hell is other people.
I'm actually surprised it is not higher. For 40-64 year old in the US, the annual chance of death is about half a percent (before covid) so a 40% increase is still a very low mortality rate.
I’m surprised it is as high as you claim! You’re saying that for that age group, in a given year, the chances are 1 in 200 of dying? That seems like pretty bad odds on something that is literally life and death.
Assuming risk is evenly distributed between birth and death, you would expect a 1 in 80 chance of dying in any given year. But since the risk is loaded towards the later years of life, 1 in 200 during the earlier years sounds about right. Perhaps it's 2x higher than I would have guessed otherwise, but it's the right order of magnitude.
If the average person had a 1/80 chance to die each year, the average life expectancy would be 40 years.
Think about this another way. You have a gun with 80 chambers and 1 bullet. How many times on average can you point it at your head and pull the trigger before it goes off? Would you still argue 80 times? On average it is the last chamber?
Your gun example has a uniform distribution between 1 and 80 with an expected value of roughly 40 if you don't spin the chamber each time between pulling the trigger. If you spin it each time, then it's again the geometric distribution and the expected value is 80.
If you don't spin the chamber between each time, then each time you pull the trigger the probability of dying at that round is not 1/80, the probability goes up and up at each round, it's only 1/80 on the first round.
I had the same initial thought, but this isn't quite a perfect model... that distribution averaging assumes that the only factor at play is covid... but there are other chances of death with highly irregular probability distributions as a function of age... with other nonlinear weightings as a function of age you could get pretty different numbers in the end...
I guess it gets more complicated because you'd die of other reasons as you age so there's no point including the eventualities where you reached 120 for example... I guess it gets pretty complicated in the end...
The question is comparable to a gun with infinitely many chambers, each with a 1/80 chance of containing a bullet: How many times on average can you point it at your head and pull the trigger? The differences are that you have no guarantee that the first 80 chambers will contain exactly 1 bullet, that more than one chamber can contain a bullet, and that you can pull the trigger more than 80 times.
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?
How old are you? How many people from your high school years have passed? Say, in your year and the years adjacent, where you might be told the news?
Out of about 90, I can count 4. Graduated 1999. 1 in 200 per year sounds like it might be ballpark, though of course from my limited set it's hard to tell. Assuming the rate is low at around 40 but a fair bit lower when you've just graduated, and a fair bit higher as you pass 60.
Well, also consider that people live to be roughly ~100 years old. The population is roughly stable, so every year ~1% of the population must die and be replaced by a ~1% is born.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html confirms that. In the US, it's about 1 in 400 for men at 40, 1 in 600 for women; at 50 it's 1 in 200 for men and 1 in 300 for women; and at 60 it's 1 in 90 for men, 1 in 150 for women. About 17% of US men, and 11% of US women, who make it to 40 are dead before 66. These are all pre-covid rates (from 02017).
Define "very low". I think the "half a percent" number can seem "artificially" low because it's just looking at the probability of death in a single year. Looking at US actuarial tables, even an 80 year old has an annual chance of death of less than 5%. Just looking at that number alone may make one think that is a "low" death rate, but nobody is surprised when an 80 year-old dies.
People really need to multiply that death rate against a population of people who are likely to be infected. And they are skipping this step for whatever reason.
A death rate of 20% isn’t bad if it’s a rare disease that has a 10 cases worldwide (2 deaths), whereas a 0.2% death rate is devastating for a highly contagious virus that spreads rapidly over the planet (millions of deaths)
That was already done, and specified in the comment.
>>“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.”
In fact, it was the entire point of the article - this disease is so bad because the entire population of people is subject to infection, and the death and disability rate is very substantial.
>>whereas a 0.2% death rate is devastating for a highly contagious virus that spreads rapidly over the planet (millions of deaths)
We've got that. Here. In this topic and case.
So, I'm really struggling to see the point of the comment. ?
> a significant portion end up losing 7-10 IQ points just from dementia
There probably is an IQ drop, but I question this figure. I recall a study doing the rounds here which showed this figure as a ballpark and it was very low quality.
From direct accounts, the figure is likely low. A good attorney friend has a friend who used to be one of the sharpest and most witty attorneys he knew. Months after a "mild case" (no hospitalization), the friend is not all there, fading in and out - he'll literally fade in and make a witty comment almost like before, then seconds later not remember it..., and hasn't been able to get back to work. That sounds like a lot more than 10 points, more like 140->95.
Even if the effects are temporary, and even if it's "only five points", I'm not interested in that risk, and you shouldn't be either.
> 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 group they are suddenly below is not that large. Either way, both the studies about the CV-19 clotting issues and mini-strokes, and that it is now known to infect, thrive in, and kill central nervos system cells is really scary.
Just the fact that one of the first things to go is the sense of smell - that's one of the oldest and most core neural pathways, leading right into the brain core. And the phnomena of patients recovering their sense of smell for a while and then it going off so that every smell/taste is like gasoline or rotting pork so they lose 30Lbs in 3 months is horrifying enough, but when I consider what it's likely doing to the brain (neuroscience was my minor in college), that just gives me the creeps. I'll take plague instead, thanks, at least it's just ordinary misery.
Edit: Here's a new interesting point -
"Long covid with neuro symptoms:
Not real enough to be factored in to disease prevention plans
> "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 declined, the numbers from younger "working age" people have increased more than enough to make up for it.
> "Just 8.9% of ICU beds are available at hospitals in the state, a low for the year, and lower than at any time during the pandemic. But the majority of ICU beds are not taken up by COVID-19 patients – just 37% are, while 54% of the ICU beds are being occupied by people with other illnesses or conditions."
Well a lot of people were avoiding medical care (precisely because of Covid concerns), so this makes some sense. Couple that with the increased death rate for younger people and something has happened to worsen the health and outcomes generally for that population. Cue wild speculation and theories.
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 (<60) from my extended social circle and their family/friends have been drug related.
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.
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.
Yeah, I've read that too, but I have no idea which is more frequent. I'd assume the tainted drugs are more frequent, just because getting tainted product is more frequent than getting clean and relapsing, but I don't know.
I'll definitely recommend LSD or mushrooms, though. They are lots of fun.
> Working from home can remove a lot of the accountability that keeps addicts in check.
This is a cruel twist, given that suicide deaths actually decreased in 2020[1], probably for the reason you've mentioned: spending nearly all of your time with others makes you accountable and removes opportunities for self-harm.
I’m not a native speaker, but there seems to be something inappropriately judgmental about the wording of “keeping in check”. Loneliness is hard for many and causes suffering, and drugs are sometimes used to try to manage suffering. More use is linked to more accidents.
It's not judgemental - it just is. Many addicts in recovery themselves use similar language. I spend a lot of time with recovering addicts and alcoholics and accountability is an important component of treatment.
I can see the judgemental interpretation, but I don't think that's what the GP intended. I read it as "most people suffering from addiction benefit from accountability, one form of which is the in-person responsibilities of work."
spending nearly all of your time with others makes you accountable and removes opportunities for self-harm.
Never would have seen it coming that encouraging people to stay isolated for years at a time and actively fearing their own proximity to one another would be detrimental.
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 socially connected have become more socially connected, while the millions who already struggled with disconnection or loneliness have become even more strained at the behest of numerous politicians who mandate their "rules for thee and not for me" under the new anxiety-laced normal.
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.
Don’t blame this on capitalism; this is a fact of nature. That humans have cobbled together a wealthy civilization capable of actually attempting to provide some measure of care for the weak is a staggering miracle.
> … capable of actually attempting to provide some measure of care for the weak is a staggering miracle.
We’re capable of doing far more to care for people than we do. The amount that we do is practically nothing in the US.
Europe seems to do a reasonably good job. Apologies if you were posting from a more socially sofisticated state. I kind of assumed and I usually try not to do that.
>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
> Working from home can remove a lot of the accountability that keeps addicts in check.
Not only that but the lockdowns making people low-key depressed which would also be a reason for using addictive substances since they often go hand-in-hand together.
I could be pretty much classified an alcoholic during most of 2019-2020 because a six-pack a day keeps the boredom away.
I just realized that I was not a real alcoholic when I stopped drinking altogether without any withdrawal symptoms or anything like that. But yeah, it's a slippery slope for sure.
Maybe you didn’t fit the addiction part of aloholism, but when it comes to consumption, a 6-pack a day definitely puts you in that category, along with associated psysical and psychological risks. I’d definitely mention that level of alcohol consumption to my GP and get all relevant blood tests
IIRC, on average it takes a month or two of having alcohol every day to start getting physiologically addicted (but - like most of biology - it can be faster or slower).
For anyone reading who thinks that may apply to them: Talk to your doctor. "Cold Turkey" alcohol withdrawals can kill.
Coincidentally all the natural cause deaths in my circle were “natural” diseases like cancer and COVID-19. I’m in my 30s now, and no longer really hang out with (non-functional) drug addicts anymore though. YMMV.
> 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.
> The article appears to attribute all accidental poisoning to fentanyl. That seems like an error.
I don't think it does. Sure, they throw out the 100k overdoses number at the end, which isn't specific to fentanyl, but the other numbers they cite are around 40k/year and a run rate of 64k/year by Deceber 2021.
It's about 62k deaths from synthetic opioids/year (excluding methadone) at the end of the series-- the vast majority of these are fentanyl. Plus a bunch of heroin deaths which are rapidly becoming "really fentanyl" deaths. And that's up to April, not December.
That data is for all ages. If you go to WISQARS and filter for ages 18-45, which is the subject of the news site's article, it looks to me like the numbers they are giving in the article are the same as the total number of accidental poisoning.
Topic 1 is on ages 18-45: more deaths from fentanyl than from...
The later topics are on all ages.
The fact sheet attributes 24k deaths in the age range to fentanyl in 2019. WISQARS accidental injuries from poisoning in the age range were 38k in 2019. 2/3rds in that age range being fentanyl is totally plausible.
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D157;jsessioni... has the broken down data. They have 36,907 deaths in 2020 from 18-45 with T40.4-- "other synthetic opioids excluding methadone". FAF is calling all deaths from synthetic opioids fentanyl, which isn't quite true but it's very likely close to true.
Government data does not say that. The CDC recorded 100k drug overdose deaths in 2020[1], ~75% of which were from opioids. They don't have a breakdown of how many of those 75k opioid deaths were fentanyl, but it's an order of magnitude below just the confirmed number of COVID-19 deaths in 2020[2].
Edit: The reporting in this article is remarkably bad: it confuses a two-year range (Jan-2020 to Dec-2021) with a one-year range, and itself contains a number that's nowhere near the number of COVID deaths:
> The drug has taken just shy of 80,000 people's lives between January 2020 and December 2021.
I agree the report makes its point poorly and phrases statistics carelessly, but you made a similar mistake: they explicitly state it exceeds COVID deaths over ages 18-45.
All these media reports were all influenced by this underlying factsheet from FAF.
Broadly, it appears true: fentanyl deaths look like they outweigh all those things in the younger population. And it doesn't look implausible that synthetic opioids could have killed a total of 64k across the entire population in 2021. (I think they were comparing trailing-twelve-month data from two dates in each case..)
edit, 3mins: I was distracted and my previous version of this reply was word salad.
Thanks for linking the factsheet. These deaths are a useless tragedy, and it frustrates me to see them framed against another useless tragedy.
The CDC's death count with age breakdowns[1] shows that over twice as many people aged 18-64 died of COVID-19 than drug overdoes, combined across 2020 and 2021. That flips when you limit it to just 18-45, which is the statistic FAF is using.
I think it's valuable to have a reference point, and I've done that myself in my comments. The frustration comes not from the comparison or reference, but as a framing designed to excuse irresponsible behavior during the ongoing pandemic.
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 help people understand the magnitude of something, but at the same time convey a misunderstanding, or short-circuit reasoning as well.
This is precisely why it is a common sales tactic: Go into a jewelry store asking for a nice watch as a present, and you may be shown a $3k watch. Way over your budget, so when you ask to be shown a something else a $700 watch seems like a much better deal, even if it might still be a bit more than you wanted to spend. Maybe the third watch will be an ugly one for $400 to help convince you that you need to spend more, putting both an upper & lower bound on the purchase.
> 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 premature death shot way up, passing traffic accidents and suicide, which we all know are really bad in that age group". And maybe "wow, fentanyl is even bigger than COVID as a cause of death among young adults".
It doesn't make me take traffic safety less seriously, either.
Look, I ain't got time each year to compute loss-of-life expectancy numbers, and decide how preventable each and every cause is, and then come up with an analytical ranking of each cause and its "importance" (I did this at one point, but I'm not going to repeat it to understand trends).
I don't work in public health, either. Approximation based on reasonable anchor points and understood risks is just fine.
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.
I've never heard the "no big deal" one. I've heard another: If responses to COVID have worsened the opioid crisis, that's a cost that should be counted against COVID mitigation measures.
(I still think this is faulty: I don't think responses to COVID have done much to change the opioid crisis. But at least this is a rational argument and open to debate).
Different social/family circles maybe? (And my own-- not always healthy-- habit of reading comments on political news site... I've mostly backed away from that for my own mental sanity) But I've seen the "no big deal" thing a fair bit. I remember one exchange nearly verbatim "Fentanyl kills more people but all the fearmongering media wants to talk about is a virus that gives you a cold".
Heck, at the very beginning people saying that sort of thing by comparison to the flu. That line of thinking went away when deaths far exceeded annual flu deaths, but with the (possible) decrease in severe cases with Omicron I've seen hints of this argument again.
> but with the (possible) decrease in severe cases with Omicron I've seen hints of this argument again.
Well, at some point, it's a reasonable argument. Risk isn't going to go to 0. It looks like with vaccination my personal risk is 2-3x influenza, but I may be overstating it.
At some point, we're going to just have to give up and assume risks. I'm not routinely wearing masks 3 years from now.
I hope it does end up being true of Omicron, a bit too soon to tell though. It's a little early to tell: We're a month on from the end of November when Omicron really hit our radar and it took a few more weeks to see the really big spike we're in right now. On the national (US) level I don't see much of an uptick in deaths yet (although my own state has a bit of one) but deaths are also a lagging indicator so it may be another month before we can really tell for sure.
Another confounding variable are testing rates: Mandatory testing is in place to a significant degree more than last year, so it is difficult to tell how many more positive tests this year are simply due to mandatory testing. For example, they're required for air travel and about 3x more people traveled this year for the holidays. This is speculation though: Relevant data would be at least in part include asymptomatic case rates from year to year, but I couldn't find a good source for that. Information like [0] are very promising but still indicate that it's too early to tell.
>At some point, we're going to just have to give up and assume risks. I'm not routinely wearing masks 3 years from now.
Mostly agreed, though as variants come & go I won't be surprised if some variants create "mask seasons" as they rise & fall. In retrospect even pre-covid it seems odd that it was deemed acceptable to go into work when you were sick with a cold or flu-- not necessarily even for severe health risks, but just as a matter of common courtesy. Of course changing that behavior in the long term would also require society (again, I'm in the US) to rethink things like what constitutes a reasonable amount of paid sick time. That is an especially problematic area when workplaces mandate 5/10/14 days of isolation but don't cover it with paid leave. My workplace does not cover that time if an employee is already out of paid sick leave. In the past, when going in to work when you were sick was somewhat optional, that made a little more sense. Now, telling someone they're losing 4% of their annual income due to a mandatory 14 day isolation period w/o pay is... I'm not sure I have a good word for it, but it feels wrong.
>"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?
They were trending up but there was a very sharp increase once the epidemic started.
>- The degree to which fentanyl is lacing other street drugs is unprecedented and seemingly independent of lockdown.
There was precedent before 2019. Seemingly independent growth that's also parabolic during 2020? Unlikely
>- Look, we don't really have "lockdown" anymore.
The genie is out of the bottle once people relapse. Maybe you don't realize how dependent recovering addicts are on rehab programs and social connections to stay clean. For some people giving them a steady unemployment income and forcing them to isolate is basically a death sentence. This was a predicted outcome during the start of the isolation.
>They were trending up but there was a very sharp increase once the epidemic started.
Visualizing the trend, the cause is debatable: extrapolating from the trend that was in place as of March 2020 [0] leads to a similar place we're at now, and we can't know if that would otherwise have levelled off. There was a sharper uptick in April/May, but not a significant variation from the smoother curve that would have fit previous data.
>The genie is out of the bottle once people relapse.
You would still expect there to be a noticeable decline: Fewer people starting down the addiction pipeline to begin with, more people that are already addicts starting to get the help they need again. There should be a noticeable decline as people reconnect to support services, and we haven't seen that yet. Maybe it's just too early to tell, but social awareness of the opioid crisis was at an all-time high in 2019/early-2020, Rx access to them was already severely limited for the previous few years, and in mid-2019 a trend that had been pretty flat for ~2 years started to significantly increase. I'm sure COVID didn't help, but there was significant upwards pressure before that and disentangling the two is not a straightforward task.
>Who do you save, upperclass/baby boomers who generally don't have these problems or disenfranchised young?
I guess we know the answer to that, not that anyone in the latter group had any doubt before we ran the experiment.
But there needs to be a discussion if that short cuircuit is our behavior in light of this. Of course the number could be higher if we didn't react, but I would guess destroying the basis of living for so many people is also quite significant and another "new" thing.
And if this sales tactic would be applied to any security issue you can more or less forget about civil liberties.
>it frustrates me to see them framed against another useless tragedy.
The framing is relevant since the increase is arguably a product of the lockdown/social isolation. Generally it's not Boomers or the upperclass who are having to deal with opiate addiction. Is it a coincidence that their needs once again supersede the needs of others? Maybe
Funny use of the word 'synthetic' to add extra spookiness. Something like 60% of first-world medicines are natural origin or secondary metabolites of natural origin - the other 40% are all synthetic. [1]
I wondered this myself, since they usually spell out "synthetic opioid" when referring to fentanyl and its ilk, ostensibly to compare it against naturally derived opioids. I have no idea how many in use today are naturally derived; maybe "synthetic" was always a scare term on that context?
The only two opioids naturally found in the poppy that are also used in medicine are codeine and morphine. All others are semi-synthetic (chemical modifications of poppy alkaloids) or fully synthetic. Even most codeine is made by methylating morphine, since the poppy under-produces it relative to medical demand.
"Synthetic opioid" is used to describe an opioid not derived from the morphine in the opium poppy (or the codeine in the dried poppy)
I am not a doctor: Of the very powerful "powder" drugs heroin is the safest as it has very little effect on the involuntary respiratory system which is the route that opiates take to kill. "Nodding off" on synthetic opiates leads commonly to death (which is why you always prod a sleeping junky - wake up!!) but not so much on heroin.
But it is much safer to smoke opium, if you wish to have such a habit. Much less chance of death and disease.
So, you cruel, nay, sadistic lawmakers: Legalise opium!
But people popping pills are nearly invisible and die quietly - people smoking opium fill up establishments, make funny smells and do not conveniently die off in the corner.....
Note that semi-synthetic is a category too that "synthetic opioid" generally excludes.
Natural opioids: codeine, morphine.
Semi-synthetic opioids: heroin, hydromorphone, hydrocodone, oxycodone, etc.
Synthetic opioids: methadone (though this is usually excluded from the reporting of "synthetic opioid overdose deaths" for various reasons), demerol, fentanyl, lots of -fentanyl analogs, etc.
In general, "synthetic" drugs are more of a menace due to the ease of transportation and production. They don't have to be produced in specific geographic regions and can be very powerful, which adds up to dangerous combination.
Here it's reasonable to differentiate between natural opioids, semi-synthetic opioids, and fully synthetic opioids. It's not a perfect measure, but the degree of potency tends to vary with the category and the fully synthetic opioids do not rely upon poppies for precursors.
>“ The synthetic and highly addictive drug has claimed more lives than COVID-19, auto crashes, gun violence, cancer and suicide in the year 2020.”
To be clear, this is false. Fentanyl overdoses (according to that article) have killed about 80,000 people in a year in the US whereas COVID-19 has killed more than 386,000. It's nowhere close. And that is not to mention all of the people COVID-19 has permanently disabled.
I know the article has some quantifiers elsewhere that could be used to form a true statement if included. But as stated, that is false and it's being used to mislead people into think COVID-19 isn't that serious.
And it's not just opiate users. People buying coke & 'molly' are overdosing too from fent and analogues too.
Why in the world would a dealer put fent into coke. I guess a speedball feels great but the average weekend partier doing a bump or a pill are not looking to walk that death tightrope.
Just sad all around and we still have a long way to go with stigma and science based treatment.
If you happen to be in that scene might be a good idea to start carrying naloxone.
I know there were a few people organizing on reddit too where they would ship it if you can't access it easily too! I think it was a lady on /r/opiates
Yep. It's not an opioid epidemic or crisis, it's a toxic drug crisis. The drugs are poisoned. No one knows what's in them.
There's a drug test site in my city that regularly posts examples of what they find on twitter. Totally random ultra dangerous poisons in party drugs. All the time.
I'm sure the coroners reports are complete and accurate, but the way this has been portrayed in the media is as "overdoses" and hand waved as an opioid issue. The reality is more complex and the issue is beyond opioids.
Yes these are "overdoses" but when the contents of the drug is not truly what the drug user is told, the drug user has no way to know what the safe dose is of the drug they are using.
Drug use has become a game of russian roulette as no one has any knowledge of what is in the drugs and there's no real safe dosage.
US has had both a drug-addiction epidemic, a diabetes epidemic and an obesity epidemic.
Each these conditions doesn't just reduce lifespan. They also put people in a more fragile life-situation where they need more support. And the US hasn't been at maintaining those kinds of support during the epidemic.
Edit: The US life expectancy decline relative to other advanced nations is relevant. Take a look at the following chart in detail. US life expectancy was set back twenty years. No other nation was set by more than ten years.
And makes people more vulnerable when they contract other diseases. COVID hits harder if you are diabetic and/or obese, for example. The people who try to promote body positivity are doing a disservice to the overweight. You cannot be healthy and fat, and we should not pretend otherwise to spare hurt feelings.
Body Positivity movement started out with a good goal, but went off the rails with the obesity == healthy BS.
However if you want to solve obesity, especially the morbid obesity shamming will never resolve that as chances are the obesity is cased by an underlying metal or medical issue. most often an anxiety disorder of some kind, and socially shaming someone that suffers from anxiety is not going to cure them, and in fact will most likely make their eating disorder worse.
The primary cause of obesity — in my experience, as a midwesterner — is a lack of access to affordable, healthy food. What people can afford (in terms of money/time/opportunity cost) is primarily overprocessed garbage. It’s mostly impossible to maintain a healthy weight in such an environment.
Yes, I’m aware of the twinkie diet guy. Most people aren’t the twinkie diet guy.
In my experience as a Midwesterner, that also has traveled to almost every states in the union, there is no problems with access to affordable healthy food in the Midwest, Large cities have more of this problem than the Midwest, Meijer, Kroger, Walmart, etc are full of healthy affordable food. In fact in many instances the junk processed food mid-westerners buy are MORE EXPENSIVE than the fresh produce
Also my experience as a Midwesterner, is the people of the Midwest enjoy sugary beverages far too much (I say that as someone that should be drinking water but instead am enjoying a glass of very sweet tea). I would say if the average Midwesterner cut out 60% of the sugary drinks the obesity problem would take a big hit.
So I disagree that we in the Midwest lack access to affordable, healthy food
>What people can afford (in terms of money/time/opportunity cost) is primarily overprocessed garbage.
I've heard that, but I'm not necessarily sure it's true.
All of the lower socio-economic areas I've lived in (in Melbourne, may be different in the US) have had an amazing selection of dirt-cheap fruit, vegetables, dried legumes and fish that are easily accessible in the main shopping area.
Often we're talking "cash only" businesses that avoid tax in order to lower the prices further, and they're always offering a ridiculous deal on in-season produce. We're talking, in AUD, $5/kg for fish, $2/kg for vegetables, $1/kg for fruit. The dried stuff doesn't go on special, but it's usually dirt cheap anyway ($15 for a 5kg bag, once you rehydrate it you get something like 20kg of chickpeas or lentils).
Lack of access to these markets is something I miss now that I'm no longer so close to Dandy/Sunshine.
Most Midwesterners have access to cheap, healthy food like frozen chicken, canned vegetables, potatoes, apples, and eggs. Especially if they get on SNAP (food stamps). The real problems are more cultural. A single large soda or a few cookies can contain more calories than a whole meal.
Rice and beans are cheap everywhere. It’s our culture that is the problem. Look at immigrants who come here, they are often healthy when they stick to their ethnic traditional food but as soon as they start eating an “American” diet they gain weight. American food is very indulgent. We even feed kids shitty over-processed food in schools. In contrast, most of Europe feeds its students locally sourced and fresh food for much cheaper. America is on the dark side of capitalism where profit motive drives everything to excess.
I don't buy that. The vast majority of people would save substantial money by eating better--either by cutting out fast food or by avoiding junk food.
Convenience/time is a big issue, but its not like the upscale versions of fast food are really that better for you.
It's a cultural thing. Nobody eating a big mac for dinner every night would switch to kale salad from Whole Foods if they got a raise. America never had a good food culture and what little we even had was based on stay-at-home wife.
Money isn't the reason why lower class Hispanic and Asian areas can support grocers with quality produce, but white lower class areas don't.
Half my families "recipes" originated on mass produced canned/boxed food labels. My grandmas chicken and rice dish calls for cambells and uncle bens. Regardless, I love it anyway.
You also cannot be healthy and dead from COVID-19. Everyone preaching healthy eating instead of vaccination during the pandemic is doing a disservice to humanity.
> You cannot be healthy and fat, and we should not pretend otherwise to spare hurt feelings.
I think I’d say more that you can’t be morbidly obese and healthy. Fat people can be healthy (just probably less likely to be healthy than someone at a “typical” weight.
Too bad this podcast’s website is crap for linking to specific episodes. Check the ep from a few weeks ago: Is Being Fat Bad For You?
At least the people you know are rational enough to admit it.
A tangential relative died a couple of months ago from a drug overdose. Her immediate family tells everyone she died from the COVID vaccine.
Apparently now it's a thing among families who can't come to grips with a drug death to blame the new vaccines. I wonder if this is where the conspiracy theorists get their ammunition.
But those died due to illegal drugs won't be elligible for insurance claim. It is strange the article only showing 40% increase in deaths. I would like to see the breakdown. Is it mostly due to heart-related deaths like stroke or cardiac arrest? How many of them has been vaccinated? How many due to natural and unnaturql causes. What I have heard was some deaths due to cardiac arrests in young people. And these are routinely classified as "natural". I like to see numbers backing that. We know vaccine caused heart inflammations and deaths. What we don't see is numbers refuting that and strange for our pharma to wait 75 years to disclose their findings. Do they need to edit the reports that already submitted to FDA?
Changes in death rates directly relate to relative vaccination rates. Vaccination was initially rolled out to the elderly they where also more willing to get vaccinated. It’s strange to think that 75 year olds grew up in a time period where several horrific diseases disappeared due to vaccination efforts. It it’s clear they have a lot more faith in vaccination.
It's strange that this article doesn't actually mention the number of deaths for each year. They only mention the 40% increase for the younger demographic and the source says "the increase in deaths represents huge, huge numbers".
Let's assume deaths for older people haven't changed so the increase is entirely among the younger group.
x: younger
y: older
1.4x + y = 1350
x + y = 1319
0.4x = 31
x = 77.5 (younger 2020)
1.4x = 108.5 (younger 2021)
y = 1241.5 (older 2020 and 20201)
So assuming no increase in non-COVID deaths in the older group, we have 77.5 deaths in 2020 and 108.5 deaths in 2021 in the younger demographic. The actual numbers would be even lower since there have obviously been deaths in the older population.
Unless I am embarrassingly wrong on the calculation, these figures don't make sense. The source says this 40% increase figure is based on his life insurance customers who are “primarily working-age people 18 to 64”. This being just among his policy holders could explain the tiny absolute figures in the younger group. But where are the numbers for the older group coming from? His statement doesn't exclude the possibility of policies for ages < 18 and > 64. But if that's a small fraction of their customer base, it would imply a huge death rate for the older policy holders.
These numbers seem very fishy. Even if his older members are dying at astronomical rates and his numbers are correct, this is about as far from a representative sample as you could get and cannot be extrapolated to the general population. And I assume that's what the source means when he says "the increase in deaths represents huge, huge numbers."
By the way, I am not implying that there hasn't been an increase in non-COVID deaths among the young and old in these last two years. We know that's the because there is actually real data on this that the article could have included.
It could be due to random perturbations in the small data size. Like if 10 people died last year, and 14 people died this year, deaths are up 40%, but the 4 extra deaths could be random. You'd have to look at a long trend to infer meaning from such small data. But I'm not sure how big the data is in this case.
Something similar happened in my town when I saw a huge-looking spike in a graph of covid deaths. But when I looked closer, deaths had spiked from 0 to 3 on a particular day, and the average is 0.3/day. So that crazy looking spike is probably meaningless over a longer time window.
Well a lot of people were avoiding medical care (precisely because of Covid concerns), so this makes some sense. Couple that with the increased death rate for younger people and something has happened to worsen the health and outcomes generally for that population. Cue wild speculation and theories.
Not sure how your first two sentences above aren't speculation. It's like you're preemptively attack all the other speculation as "wild".
There is uncertainty in many areas of life, but this seems like one thing we don’t have to speculate about. We will not only have definitive data [1] within a couple years, but also annual [2] and weekly [3] provisional data much sooner.
Without knowing anything else, I seriously doubt that is statistically significant.
The normal pre-COVID ICU bed occupancy rate was somewhere near 57-82% (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840149/). 54% is quite low. I suspect that the bar for getting into an ICU bed has been raised by the number of COVID patients.
Not sure what fentanyl death rates did in a particular neighborhood in the US, what I know is that CDC reported 100k overdose deaths /year for 2020-2021. That pales in comparison to the 600k excess deaths we had in the first 9 months of the pandemic in the US.
Specially if you consider that the overdose deaths did not suddenly appear in 2020.
Numbers are tricky though. There’s much less than 100k covid deaths for those under 50. Whereas I would guess that’s the lion share of opioid deaths. 50-64 is another weird inflection point. It’s totally possible for covid to kill 6x as many people but for opioids to have a bigger impact of life expectancy. One 20 year old death is only offset by 60 or so 80 year old deaths.
That’s simply because fentanyl is cheap enough that the drug syndicates in the golden triangle are flooding the market with it. It’s so cheap to produce in industrial quantities using perfectly legal, easily acquired industrial chemicals that they really don’t care how many shipments get seized because a small amount can be cut into a whole lot of sellable product, so they don’t try as hard to smuggle it in.
Too many fentanyl shipments got sized in 2020, so they partially switched to the 100x more potent (and lethal) carfentanyl. Since it's so powerful a slightly badly mixed product that would have been safe-ish using fentanyl become assuredly lethal with carfentanyl.
For those confused by the P2P acronym as I was, it's apparently a synthesis route that was developed in response to the crackdowns on OTC ephedrine products. It's apparently a lot more pure than the older stuff, at least according to https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/
The Atlantic wrote a really good deep dive piece into the differences recently. Highly recommend reading through it. There are a lot of unknowns about the long term consequences. Anecdotally, people close to me in the mental health industry are really distraught about it.
It’s cheaper now and way more socially acceptable (decriminalized) to use meth in public (at least in west coast states). My dad was a meth user and only got clean when he was incarcerated. I bet there are thousands who just spiral downward further and further until they just die because now there are no consequences or barriers or repercussions to stop this behavior. Not only that, we incentivize and subsidize drug use in some cities. San Francisco has an “adult” support program that gives homeless people a debit card which they can withdraw cash from. I guarantee 90% of that cash is spent on fentanyl and meth. They give out dozens of needles at a time (once saw one dude with literally 300-500 needles) to drug users but not to diabetics. We have really skewed/inverted our priorities.
Jesse and Walter steal a barrel of methylamine so Jesse no longer has to boost ephedrine across the state. It does not, however make the end product blue
Sort of a little case study in how clamping down on precursors just drives producers to change the formula, while making things more difficult for all the legitimate users of the precursor materials.
Just for background and not trying to malign the source, but the was at a press conference where the Chamber of Commerce and hospital leaders were imploring state residents to get vaccinated as to avoid a vaccine mandate that the state legislature was considering for employers
Feels like the insurance guy at this press conference is trying to 'scare' young folks into getting the vaccine.
My question is, the life insurance company would see all the death certificates, if they don't say Covid, what do they say?
Not strictly so. An example of misaligned incentives would be an insurance salesman/CEO overstating the likelihood of death, and thus overstating the likelihood of a payout to the customer. This hypothetical would result in greater margin for the insurer.
In a lot of cases we don't even have a good cause of death. There are a lot of areas without a good medical examiner system and the systems are overloaded even when they normally are good.
Covid is quite capable of killing with a clot when your symptoms aren't to the point that you'll be in the hospital these days. This will show up as a stroke or a heart attack or pulmonary embolism--and if the docs don't put in the effort they won't know it was Covid (and for that matter it can't be proven anyway--lethal clots happen even without Covid. While it's a reasonable presumption that Covid caused the clot there's no proof in any given case.) There's also a lot of families that don't want Covid on the death certificate--even more reason the clot won't be attributed to Covid.
(And, yes, there are plenty of other ways clots can kill--I'm just looking at the cases that are likely to kill without ever reaching the hospital.)
Undertakers have also been noticing this--lots of bodies showing Covid clotting even though they aren't reported as Covid deaths.
Edit: I forgot an additional factor. If you do survive your Covid hospital stay you have a substantially elevated all-cause mortality rate at least for the next year. AFIAK the mechanism has not yet been identified.
“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.”
This sounds very strange indeed, I'd like to see the numbers. For instance Euromomo https://www.euromomo.eu collects the statistics about death rates, here is a plot for the Italian death rate and you can see the mortality spikes with the covid waves, but those are quite specific for the elderly https://imgur.com/a/8cUdNcb
It sounds very strange that the death spike is "over" 3 sigma, which should mean over 3 standard deviations, which is really unbelievable, to me this looks like an artefact of some sort
If the dataset which went into the «3 sigma» had no major catastrophes, like WW2 / covid / … then such an event can probably get you into «3 sigma territory».
> It sounds very strange that the death spike is "over" 3 sigma, which should mean over 3 standard deviations, which is really unbelievable, to me this looks like an artefact of some sort
Why does the fact that it is larger than 3 standard deviations suggest to you that it must be an artifact? If the death rate is normally very stable then the standard deviation will be small, so it will be easy for any unusual increase to exceed that.
I think the other thing that may be possible (just guessing, I'm not a statistician or actuarial) is that by using the term "3 sigma" I'm assuming they're modeling the data as a normal distribution. But these types of outlier events often follow power laws, such that you get "fat tails" when looking at a bell curve.
> that by using the term "3 sigma" I'm assuming they're modeling the data as a normal distribution
variance and standard deviation don't only apply to normal distributions. and "sigma" is the symbol normally used for variance regardless of the underlying distribution.
Yes, I'm fully aware that variance and standard deviation apply to any sample or population, and that sigma is normally used for standard deviation.
However, in everyday usage, saying something is a "2 or 3 sigma" event nearly always refers to a normal distribution unless otherwise noted, because otherwise that information doesn't really tell you anything. Is only with a specific distribution that can imply a percentage likelihood, e.g. 5% for a 2 sigma event or .3% for a 3 sigma event. Also, if you're looking at at annual probability, 1-in-200 year event would correspond to just about 3 sigma on a normal distribution.
And the number of people dying per (large) unit of time is almost certainly well approximated by a normal distribution, modulo seasonal variation and events such as this (which break the "independence" assumption of the CLT).
The point is that you expect a normal distribution without fat tails. Fat tails are a sign of non random processes. Which lets you know some non random process is happening.
As the sibling comment wrote, it's not non-random processes in this instance, it's processes that aren't independent.
That is, when generally looking over any death rates in a relatively large population, most deaths in a given year are uncorrelated, so things look like a normal distribution. Obviously with a transmissible virus, the fact that two people died in the same year of Covid is correlated.
Similarly, if you did the math from the insurance company's data, I'd bet you'd find the chance of everybody dying in the same year would be like 1 in many, many trillions of years. But of course things like supervolcanos or meteor strikes are possible. Those aren't non-random, it's just that everyone's death would correlate with that single event.
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.
Of course, I think it's very fair to say the devastation from a war is much worse than Covid (a war destroys infrastructure and primarily kills the young), but from a pure "number of deaths" perspective I think most people have a huge difficulty comprehending the severity of the pandemic.
Covid has obviously caused infrastructure problems, though the contrast with a war is similar. There are tons of minor maintenance tasks where there are one or two people who need to do some thing every week. Maybe all the people who are responsible for the task are laid up for a week and incapable of doing the maintenance. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of people getting infected every week you end up with a lot of missed maintenance. And of course the risk that those one or two or three key people die and the task never gets done again until the system just hits the failure mode that the task was intended to avoid.
> but from a pure "number of deaths" perspective I think most people have a huge difficulty comprehending the severity of the pandemic.
Some 55 million people die each year. An extra 5 million is a big deal, yes, but there's almost 8 billion people on the planet. I think most people have a huge difficulty comprehending just how many humans there are on earth.
> 3 standard deviations, which is really unbelievable
People reporting on deaths have to average over a period, otherwise you find deaths drop on weekends and spike on mondays because that's when the paperwork gets processed. In this case, they're averaging over an entire quarter.
I could well believe that the variance in death rates between Q4 2008 and Q4 2018 had a standard deviation of 3% - an entire quarter is a lot of averaging.
If you did it annually, you'd get rid of seasonal effects and probably get a smaller std dev. Using quarters gives you the full variability of the seasons, so it is a more conservative 3 sigma, in a sense.
> It sounds very strange that the death spike is "over" 3 sigma, which should mean over 3 standard deviations, which is really unbelievable, to me this looks like an artefact of some sort
It's not an artifact, it's incorrect modeling. If they're talking about sigmas, then they're modeling deaths as being normally distributed. But deaths aren't normally distributed, as you can tell by glancing at a graph of deaths over time: there's way more probability mass in the extremes than you would expect from a normal distribution. This sort of thing (modelling something poorly, then getting all surprised when reality violates your model) is depressingly common.
Overall death rates are highly affected by age distribution in the population - the proportion of 80-100 year olds in your population in a given year is going to have a big impact on the death rate that year.
Death rates for an age range (like 18-45) are likely to be much more stable.
Also, pretty dubious about that specific dataset - it looks like it includes linear interpolations between a much smaller set of actual datapoints, so not sure you can use it to infer the actual distribution of death rate statistics
> Death rates for an age range (like 18-45) are likely to be much more stable.
Do you have a data set for this to look at? I'm skeptical that death rates of any kind are close to normally distributed. If nothing else, there are big spikes during plagues, like the black plague and spanish flu.
You can't assume a standard normal distribution for something like death rates that are know to have a very high prevalence of right tail events like famine, war, and disease.
"see the numbers?" This story is from a life insurance company. It doesn't say "the death rate is up overall". It says "our policyholders are dying at an astonishingly high rate."
And it is indeed a very high rate.
The insurance guy was civilized enough not to complain that his company's incurring lots of losses -- getting hammered by writing lots of checks to survivors. But surely that's how an insurance company knows what's going on.
It makes no sense for an executive of a mutual insurance company to sling bs about this kind of loss. Because auditors.
I feel like article like this one are commonly used by the anti-vaccine community. They point to those ominous, rising death numbers and understand them as evidence for the dangers of mRNA vaccines. It would therefore (among other reasons) be helpful to understand where exactly that rise in numbers comes from, is it vaccines (which I don't think, else we'd be seeing a similar spike in, say, Europe)? Or is it being caused by other factors, such as fetanyl?
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.
The vaccine does not prevent anyone from getting or spreading covid. In Ontario same case rate of covid per 100k residents, in unxxed as vaxxed and heading higher. 3rd graph.
This is the only metric still left, which ma be just time delayed.
Also people in ICU with covid may not be the same thing as people in ICU because of covid. It may likely just be that very sick people in hospitals are refusing the vaccine and catching it.
Hospitals are confined spaces that aid in transmission of all kinds of diseases.
The difference is 40 people out of a population of 14.5 million.
So small it could literally be people with terminal diseases catching covid on their death beds.
To use this to advocate for any preventative effect in a healthy individual in the general population would be misleading.
Very likely the difference is just sampling bias.
The simple explanation, that getting a vaccination that prevents or reduces the impact of a disease makes more sense. To the point that it’s a no-brainer.
It’s a moot point now, as this phase of the pandemic is played out. People embraced fear, ignorance and doubt in the name of freedom. Many will needlessly suffer as a result.
Wearing gloves to prevent frostbite is a no Brainer too. Telling people in Hawaii to wear gloves to reduce frostbite in Canada is what I think the contentious issue is. A simple solution can be just as brain dead.
The vaccine has side effects. Loss of dexterity from wearing gloves also has serious consequences.
I don't think that is seriously questioned with the Delta and Omicron variants. Vaccines do seem, however, to reduce the probability of having a serious infection that requires hospitalization or ICU admission. It's a novel virus and it and the situation around it evolves very quickly.
The anti-vax crowd conveniently ignores that detail, and unfortunately the people who give them credence are paying the price through needless suffering or even death.
There are statisticians who have made such claims by modeling many highly vaccinated countries. I am not claiming they are right or wrong, but there are people who claim they have found this signal in the data using statistical methods.
They have graphs with excess deaths by age groups and you can see that 2021 looks worse than 2020, with a noticeable upwards trend starting around week 16 of 2021.
No. Scroll down to "Excess mortality", look at 15-44 and 45-64 years graphs. The light blue line is 2021. It shows an upward trend that goes way beyond the ranges for 2020 and 2019.
Mainstream articles are biased with the spin of the situation but the facts are there. It goes over some causes of deaths - mostly heart/clotting issues, exactly what you’d expect from the vaxx. That’s why we call it the “clot-shot”
In England people who took the vaxx are twice as likely to die as those who don’t:
Notice how they don’t deny the statistic. They just say it’s taken “out of context” because covid deaths, and vaccines save lives. No matter how they spin it they can’t deny government data says vaccinated 18-59 are much more likely to die. That’s a fact, even though it’s marked as false by Reuters.
Doesn't that all make sense? I'm not sure what the issue is here.
The statistic that vaccinated people 18-59 are dying at twice the rate presumably true, so of course the reuters article doesn't deny it. The Reuters article presents a totally believable explanation, which is also in the original article's comments. What they are saying is that this can be true for the age range 18-59, but simultaneously not be true for any specific age brackets within that range.
This is called Simpson's paradox. The explanation is that vaccination rates are higher among the elderly than among the young, and that the elderly have a higher baseline rate of death, and the Reuters article breaks out the numbers to demonstrate this. What's the big mystery exactly?
Simpson’s paradox is fascinating. If the result above does not seem intuitive, think of an extremely simplified version: imagine that half of everyone in their 50’s is vaxxed and no one on their 20’s is. Next imagine that of 1000 people in their 50’s, 100 of 500 vaxxed people die from non-covid sources, 100 of 500 unvaxxed people die from non-covid sources, plus 50 unvaxxed people in their 50’s die from covid and no vaxxed people do. And imagine that 0 out of 2000 people in their 20’s die from anything.
150 out of 2500 unvaxxed deaths in 18-59
100 out of 500 vaxxed deaths in 18-59 (higher rate)
But: 150 of 500 unvaxxed deaths in 50-59
100 of 500 vaxxed deaths in 50-59 (lower rate)
It would be true that more vaxxed people died than unvaxxed in the 18-59 age group without the vaccine causing any death, but only because the larger number of surviving young people swamps the higher relative death rates among the higher relative vaxxed elderly.
Yes that explanation is plausible. I replied to another comment below what I take away from that statistic… mainly that vaccine mandates are BS given other factors such as age has such an impact on mortality and spread.
Each of your references are saying completely different things.
1) non-covid excess mortality
2) mortality rate between those vaxxed and not vaxxed.
3) Reteurs was not 'debunking' point 2 or point 1. They are 'debunking' crap statements on Joe Rogan Podcast about the absollute numbers of those dying from COVID in general.
Alex Berenson is terribly misrepresenting information.
So when you say "That's a Fact" - you don't even seem to be sure what facts you're referring to, and they are obviously taken out of context, at face value.
A)
For point 3, the Reuters debunking of 'Most of the COVID deaths are those vaccinated' (Alex Berenson on Joe Rogan Podcast misinformation).
Suppose 100% of the citizens of the UK are vaccinated.
The vaxx is good, but not perfect - so some will die.
Are you going to run around saying '100% of those dying were vaccinated - therefore the vaxx is crap'.
That would be 'a fact' i.e. '100% of deaths are those who are vaccinated'.
But how helpful is that fact? It's not.
It'd be like saying '99% of those dying from car accidents were wearing seatbelts, therefore seat-belts are dangerous'
B)
Data point 2, which shows that 'Vaxxed people aged 10-59 are dying at 2x the rate those unvaxxed' - is also misleading.
(FYI they are talking about 'death rates' not absolute deaths, which is why it's different than the Joe Rogan Podcast misinformation.)
The likelihood of someone being vaccinated goes up dramatically with their likelihood of dying from COVID.
59-year-olds are vaxxed at a much higher rate than 10 or 20 year olds.
Especially those with underlying conditions.
And it's going to be overwhelmingly people in those situations that die from COVID.
Here's an analogy:
People aged 50+ and those 30+ with underlying conditions are going for a 'dangerous car ride'.
Everyone else is going for a 'safe car ride'.
Everyone is asked to wear their seatbelts.
Some people, particularly those going on the 'safe car ride' - are not wearing seatbelts.
As a result: all the 'big crashes' are in the 'dangerous car-ride' cohort.
That means almost all of the deaths will be among those who are wearing seatbelts, because, well, they were going on a 'dangerous car ride'.
The kids who didn't bother to wear seatbelts, were mostly going on the 'safe ride' and there were not many accidents at all.
If we popularized the notion of 'People with seatbelts more likely to die' - it would be totally misleading, because people would come to believe that 'Seatbelts Kill You' - when, the total opposite is true - seatbelts save lives.
...
People that are smart enough to know the difference, and continue to propagate it, are deliberately misleading people.
People that aren't bright enough (or don't have the time) to spot the difference ... shouldn't be propagating information.
> 59-year-olds are vaxxed at a much higher rate than 10 or 20 year olds.
This is the only intelligent response to explain why overall mortality is 2X higher in the vaxxed group.
I agree with you this could be an explanation. The problem is it still completely destroys the idea that unvaccinated are the ones who should be restricted from society. It shows your age is more important than vaccine status. Someone being obese or not is also more important than vaccine status. Whether you had prior infection is more important than vaccine status.
If it was true that the vaccine was so NEEDED you had to mandate it for the younger age groups, take away their civil liberties without a regular testing option then you’d have to make a strong case those age groups are dying in large numbers. They aren’t - and that’s how I interpret this statistic.
I think there are many other ways to prove hundreds of thousands have died from the vaccine. Here are some more:
Seatbelts don’t cause myocarditis. The vaccine can cause adverse events and the way these are being discounted is inhumane. All this while it doesn’t even stop spread… the most vaccinated places have the highest case counts per million. Yet governments are pushing more mandates making unvaccinated second-class citizens. MISInformation stands for Massively Important Statistical Information… and I’m going to spread it as long as governments try to ruin my life for a personal medical decision.
EDIT: I swear they changed that fact check. Read it again - it used to link exactly where I linked to. I guess it was easier to debunk something else
"This is the only intelligent response to explain why overall mortality is 2X higher in the vaxxed group."
It does not really need an explanation.
We already have conclusive data of the power of vaccines.
" The problem is it still completely destroys the idea that unvaccinated are the ones who should be restricted from society."
No it doesn't.
COVID spreads quickly among the young and old.
There is no way to systmatically just keep the vulnerable in a bubble. We can reduce their interactivity, but if COVID is widespread, that won't protect them or anyone.
Vaccines reduce spread significantly, which is why we want everyone to get them.
If you want to drive in the winter, in Canada you need to 1) have insurance 2) pass a test and 3) have winter tires 4) have your car up to a bunch of standards.
And you cannot drink and drive.
Those curtailments of your civil liberties exist because you can screw up other people's lives.
> prove hundreds of thousands have died from the vaccine. Here are some more:
That link doesn’t “prove” anything. By its own admission, it’s a “hypothesis”, and it’s based on a number of questionable assumptions, including assuming there’s a 41x multiplier of reported anaphylactic events immediately after vaccination, (plausible), assuming it’s comparable to a multiplier of reported deaths over a much longer time period (not plausible), and then assuming what percentages of those multiplied unreported deaths are “legitimate” based on a host of small sample sizes that, even if they are accurate (another assumption), we have no idea if they are representative enough to accurately scale to much larger numbers (completely implausible)
Besides, the theory doesn’t even pass the smell test. The months last year with the lowest excess deaths in the US - March and April - just happen to be the months with the highest numbers of administered covid vaccine doses
Note that it’s possible the vaccines are less safe than advertised and that adverse events and even deaths are more common than acknowledged (and that vaccine mandates are wrong), and for those true numbers to be much smaller than 150,000
He says it's going to cost the company more but could there also be an increased incentive for covered employees to increase their coverage and thus increase the premium revenue to OneAmerica? I am generally dubious when the CEO of a (private) company that's bottom line is so closely tied to death rates publishes an article with such a nice round number increase in the death rate.
Assuming that COVID deaths are fully accounted for, that would mean about 200k excess deaths due to other, presumably COVID related, factors (suicide, drug overdose, ...).
That's what the CEO is quoted as saying: What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.
It could also hint that excess deaths from lockdown policies are higher than expected. COVID deaths are almost certainly undercounted by some factor, but suicides and drug overdoses are skyrocketing. These numbers would make sense if the cure is worse than the disease too.
Assuming that all covid deaths are accounted for and all the rest of the excess deaths are from lockdown, there would have to be at least as many excess deaths as covid deaths to start saying the cure is worse than the disease. From the numbers it seems like there would be about 800k covid deaths to 200k excess (in the USA), so that would indicate the disease was 4x worse than the cure. Of course those are all assumptions that I don’t think are accurate, but using your own logic.
But one thing we probably can agree on is that at this point covid is endemic and most people have given up trying to get to zero cases.
For me, I personally just integrated into my worldview the fact that I can’t trust most humans to give a shit about others (like following simple mask and vaccine guidelines) and have to protect my family however best I can, even if that means less social interaction for the rest of my life.
Usually, when people say the cure is worse than the disease, they are suggesting that [cure + disease] is worse than [disease without cure]. I am sorry that was imprecise.
There is an assumption here that the lockdowns have reduced the number of COVID deaths. That is not necessarily the case, and actually the evidence points to the contrary: looking at state data, it looks like strict lockdown policies taken in some states in the US were ineffective at best, and may have been harmful.
"The evidence requirements for claims $20,000 and over, including death and broader operation of the scheme will be published shortly. Claims relating to a death will not require evidence of hospitalisation."
If you look at the global numbers not all countries had a similar drop in life expentency (ie. Denmark and New Zealand had no drop) but went through similar or more severe lockdown and vaccine policies.
Yes, exactly. Lockdowns and vaccines are not the only covid prevention policies. Stimulus checks and unemployment compensation (along with their universality and the ease and speed of obtaining them), testing availability, and general healthcare access also fit into the "covid prevention policies" category, and can be reasonably suspected to have had some impact on life expectancy.
Missouri coroners proudly admit they aren’t counting any COVID deaths. It’s definitely being undercounted. I know someone who died in Wisconsin but the hospital said he didn’t have COVID then a year later they admitted they’d done the test wrong and actually didn’t know. None of the data provided is reliable. More people should be worried about how unreliable our healthcare system.
This isn't some everyday funeral home director - this fellow had previously been in the alt-news (https://fullfact.org/health/funeral-director-interview/), with baseless claims like facemasks causing pneumonia or that all the people who died in care homes were euthanized using midazolam or that the covid vaccines were never tested (at all) before deployment. I would not consider him an authoritative or unbiased source.
That doesn’t pass smell test to me. A 5x increase in workload for funeral homes would mean ballpark 5x as many deaths. That would be apocalyptic and impossible to miss. Every ER doc and ambulance driver in the US would be talking about it. For reference, the 2020 death rate is only about 1.15x the 2019 rate due to covid.
it's not really a video about increase of deaths and heart-attacks - it's just a video that compiles all sorts of sport-related deaths and heart-attacks, we do not actually know if there's an increase or not, since no data from before 2020 was presented
My understanding is cardiac deaths early in life are mostly caused by congenital issues that are more likely to shake out under stress, and those late in life are dominated by issues acquired via lifestyle.
Among people under 35 (most athletes) athletes are at significantly higher risk. It's possible tables turn later in life, can't really find a source. Anecdotally I knew two people growing up who died suddenly of congenital heart issues, and both were athletes.
A potential bias for 2021 would be that: In 2021 some people are worried about a vaccine->heart link and for any given event may be more likely to document it online and/or add it to Wikipedia. As such we might not be measuring number of cardiac arrests, and actually may be measuring public attention paid to cardiac arrest.
Notability is sort of a bad metric since it’s incredibly subjective. And we’re not just worried about extraneous inclusions in 2021, we’re also concerned about missing data points for previous years - there’s no real statistical correction for “my inputs are biased in unknown ways”. You need to do real analyses with better quality data (i.e., national death registries) to find a ground truth to compare to. But good news, since this is quite a hot topic I’d expect that people are already looking into that.
Being skeptical doesn't mean that the numbers are not to be believed. It means that the numbers are to be investigated. Often, unintuitive numbers turn out to be accurate after investigation, but unless we do the hard work of investigation, we can't know.
The 72% figure was a computer prediction somehow gone wrong, I don't know the details of what went wrong.
However, it's obvious Omicron is absolutely exploding--the testing system is completely swamped at this point so we don't know the real rate. That's enough to say that by now the 72% likely is right.
Covid is vanishingly unlikely to kill people in this age group. I always find it hard to find a clear number when I Google for a recent IFR, but it’s a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
The problem is the age group they gave is very wide: 18-64. It would be helpful if they could sub-divide this to give better perspective to which age group is seeing the largest shift.
What is your best guess based on what you've read, and for what age group is that figure for specifically? I have also been googling and have found no good source.
Death from any cause is unlikely in this age group. When the denominator is already small, small changes mortality can be cast as an alarming-sounding "40% increase" you really need to look at the raw numbers.
I think your assumption is very wrong. COVID is a leading cause of death for Americans in the 18-64 age group in the US. The IFR is irrelevant when counting the dead.
This may well be true in some suitably qualified sense, but it's odd to be hearing it from an insurance company first. General population death records would enable government health agencies to catch such large statistical shifts more quickly than an insurance company. I suspect what they're seeing is real, but they're exaggerating how representative it is of all geographic regions and socioeconomic strata. Maybe there's another wave of fentanyl ODs hitting the Rust Belt / Appalachia.
Working as an actuary. The only way I can make sense of this headline (GDPR block) is: normally for age X deaths Y. Of those Y there are many with health preconditions that can’t get life coverage. Now a disease hits that kills some and effects everyone (this is somewhat contrary to the usual view of corona). You can have a massive increase in deaths without preconditions even if the absolute rise is small. So their deaths are up 40% compared to the expectation of the insurer (not general mortality).
In other words: because of selection at the gate for long life you can get up to 50-70% lower premiums than the standard table assumes. So this insurer is having quite the scare.
It’s one of the reasons why many EU insurers have balanced portfolios (and are strongly favored by regulation to be balanced). Long life, short life, pensions all in a basket with reinsurance to get these risks of the books. Throw in some P&C and A&H books as well (lower incidence of traffic accidents for example) and the company could be robust to corona. Now the interest rate and inflation, that’s a different story.
From the article: “working-age people who are employees of businesses with group life insurance policies” - that’s a quite comparable effect although indeed not via the individual health screening thus less pronounced. Those not working are quite more likely to die.
What I don’t under from the article: they mention a $100 million loss on disability, but the effect of this size on mortality should be many billions.
Somewhat smaller denominator, sure, but changes in the numerator should also be smaller for similar reasons: healthier population, employed, therefore more shielded from socioeconomic stresses around the pandemic.
I sort of agree that the insurance financial risks associated with a low mortality population can be high in unusual situations, but it's not a blanket explanation for any particular situation.
People aren't getting as much exercise, sitting around more eating cheetos and drinking beer, doing more drugs and getting more depressed. I'm not suggesting that all of those are happening to everyone, but each of them is a risk factor and due to the pandemic they're occurring to different segments of the population at the same time.
> 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 even pass muster that a 10% increase in deaths would be a “once in 200 years” event. When has there ever been a 200 year period without major war, disease or disaster? What exactly are they smoking?
I doubt there's an actuarial crisis brewing, for the simple reason that changes in life expectancy are a known risk which can be hedged. In the case of life insurance companies, the usual solution is to also sell life annuities; if insurance payouts go up, annuity payouts go down.
>We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years.
I just don't take it seriously anymore. Track 200 factors, 200 businesses, or 200 industries and you will see 1 event per year. Track all of the above and you will see 40,000 such events in a year.
More to the point, their actuarial model was probably wrong, not reality. Somewhere buried in their model were assumptions excluding black swan events
Ok, but the important ones are resource limited and possibly highly correlated. So if you see 1/200 for all sorts of (possibly correlated) events you might be misreading the implication.
I think the more thought-provoking question is what exactly is the Black Swan event? If only 37% of their ICU beds are used for COVID patients then why are so many more people dying right now?
It is the US so unlike most of the rest of the world even if there were a lot of surplus ICU beds most people can't afford the 100K USD with insurance or 1M USD with under-insurance or no insurance it would cost them out of pocket to receive treatment.
> most people can't afford the 100K USD with insurance or 1M USD with under-insurance or no insurance it would cost them out of pocket to receive treatment
Where are you getting these numbers? I know multiple people in the US who have needed a COVID ICU bed, and they certainly weren't paying $100k out of pocket to do so. In most areas of the US, $100k could buy you a small house.
Three years ago, 0% of ICU beds were used for COVID patients. Now it is 37%. If ICU admission correlates with risk of death, and those beds would have been empty otherwise, or used for lower risk patients, a 40% increase in deaths seems reasonable. Certainly not a rigorous analysis, but it passes the smell test.
Homicides are up, In Atlanta it's 65% from 2019, other cities are similar. I think car fatalities as well. Then the isolation, COVID fears and economic issues have made worse an already growing drug and suicide problem.
I've known of quite a few deaths of youngish people recently and only one was COVID related. Car crashes, ODs and other medical issues. Like I've known two girls both about 30 that died unexpectedly of non-covid medical issues last year.
1) 37% of ICU beds for Covid means about a 50% increase in ICU patients.
2) If you go into the ICU for Covid you're probably leaving via the morgue. The survival chance for a Covid patient in the ICU is a lot lower than the typical ICU patient.
There is one possibility which this community will flag & downvote anyone for suggesting, which is shameful; the idea should be entertained and then dismissed, if appropriate.
You can pretty much blame six sigma for these braindead once in 200 years predictions. When you beat your effecency numbers into the ground then have to explain a .000001 varianc will only happen in 200 years based on this totally detached from real world statistic model is hew you get here.
The person that sold that idea cashed out and left the company long ago.
I'm not sure about the case at hand here, but one reason for hearing about these events more often than once every 200 years might be because they are uncorrelated.
E.g. a "once in 200 years drought" in California might happen at the same time as a "once in 200 years over-mortality event" in Indiana.
News would tend to report on these, so we see many of these even though they are rare.
Keep in mind that "once in two hundred years" is (an estimate of) the probability of a given event. The more events you track, the more "once in two hundred years" events you'll see in any given year. If you're tracking (or reporting on) many events...
Think of the number of hundred year floods you see reported on each year. Then look at the number of floodplains that your news source would report on...
I'd guess war is usually excluded from insurance policies.
I wonder if the 1 in 200 year example wasn't communicated very well; it could be the actuaries view a long-lasting 10% increase to be the 1 in 200 year event; it does sound low for a single year stress.
I commented on this elsewhere, but I think your point is fair. Many real-world processes follow power laws, but they are modeled as normal distributions. The issue with that is that a power law can "look like" a normal distribution, except it has fat tails, where you get these "once until the heat death of the universe" type events much more frequently.
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.
Totally, I’ll claim to have been very pessimistic before it happened. Referenced the likely downturn in an economics assignment that didn’t impress my very optimistic lecturer. I missed the bottom though, was convinced we were going down a lot further. Don’t fight the Fed, I guess.
Yeah I think he used the word intuition. Exactly same insight though. I think “recency” is the bias that causes our view that tomorrow will be pretty similar to today. I’ve noticed it in myself, for sure. Market at X? Yup that seems rational. Hard to imagine the market at 2X or 1/2X. Bitcoin blew my mind during the ultra-growth phases.
Anecdotally, I see a lot of pseudo-rigor in Business oriented statistics. Leadership selects the statistics and statisticians which make the most rigourous plausible model that achieves the desired outcome.
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.
There’s a confounding effect arising from the difficulty in comparing false negative rates between person-meteor-strike and person-lottery-jackpot. Whereas lottery-jackpot events are rarely misinterpreted as some prat dropping rubbish onto person, person-meteor-strike too often is.
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.)
Interesting! Pretty obviously some sloppy science but I'm not sure that's a debunk. For something in the Bible to turn out to be based on real events with religious overtones added. Religions are always poaching from history, to find some truth to a story in a religious work is not surprising, nor is it a confirmation of the religious aspects of it.
> And how does it even pass muster that a 10% increase in deaths would be a “once in 200 years” event. When has there ever been a 200 year period without major war, disease or disaster? What exactly are they smoking?
I don't know if it's a once in 200 years event or not, but this is a US insurance company, presumably talking about numbers in the US. Aside from ww2, in which the US had around 400,000 deaths, the number of Americans who have died in wars or disasters has been fairly small relatively.
Even the 400,000 for WW2 was over four years, whereas the US has had around 400,000 covid deaths a year for the last two years, and even more if you just look at excess mortality (however the population is obviously larger now than during ww2).
> We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years.
"Experts" making such a statement usually assume the variable in question to be standard distributed – which is close enough to the truth for non-extreme outcomes. But a lot of variables do not behave like the perfect standard distribution at all: due to non-linear effects and self-enforcing feedback loops, their distribution deviates more and more from the standard distribution the more extreme their values gets (they are "fat-tailed").
Referring to the n-sigma of such extreme events is plain and simple stupid, because there's no such thing as a standard deviation (or variance) for a fat-tailed distribution.
Many probability distributions have a variance[1], not only the standard distribution. Why do you think there is no variance for your "fat-tailed distribution"?
We might. Could be a Black Swan event. Just the same, all along we should have been asking about "collateral damage." We ignored it. That's sadly suspicious.
Obviously, we don't have other pandemics' data to lean on. But we did have the economic crisis circa 2007 - 2008. There was plenty of analysis about the socio-economic impact of that event. That is, for example, poverty rate goes up, so does X, Y and Z.
If we can model a pandemic, can we not also - at least try - to mobel the impact of "the cure" and possible collateral damage?
18-64 is an extremely broad range. Does anyone have a breakdown of smaller ranges? I'd like to know what is accounting for the deaths of younger people, since supposedly, statistically covid has a very mild effect on their health.
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[ 7.7 ms ] story [ 388 ms ] threadBut they are tracking people regardless of whether they have a cookie consent banner or not.
ETA: under GDPR, blocking the EU geographically (e.g. via GeoIP), in combination with requiring user registrations to specify that they’re not EU citizens, would be considered a “good-faith effort” to avoid collecting the data of EU citizens.
If you have a real legitimate interest, you don't need my consent, so I feel entirely justified in objecting to their fake-ass "legitimate interest" (i.e. please let us do what we want).
>Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
So he sees the data for non elderly people, because those are the people who have his company's plans. So he doesn't have the data to compare against to say elderly people aren't dying at higher rates because they aren't his customers
>that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64”
Anywho without more info about what access to data he is making his observations on, we're just speculating. Definitely can't say he is factually wrong with the vague and open bits of info from the article. It's just quotes that could mean almost anything.
-------
[1] https://www.oneamerica.com/newsroom/news-releases/oneamerica...
"that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying"
Am I missing something? Is this not a comparison?
It's not intended to be taken alone as a statement about the elderly.
You could say his information is biased because it is limited to folks that have insurance through his company, but he's up front about that.
Quoted verbatim from the source article. This is a plain statement on the death rate of that specific age group.
Also as others have mentioned, this part may have been added by the reporter who definitely doesn't cite Amy source for the comparison. Either option equates to poor reporting.
"There has been an increase in deaths of working age 18-64 year olds."
Full stop. No need to mention the elderly.
Simply stating that deaths are up for working age people is more than sufficient and avoids adding unclear information. There is no reason to make any statement about any group that is not included in the data.
If I have data on goose deaths in Florida, I wouldn't say "goose deaths are up in Florida, but not because they're dying in New Jersey!"
I simply cannot make a statement on New Jersey goose mortality because my data says nothing about New Jersey
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 who are dying (to account for this increase), but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
Plus, he actually could say "that elderly people aren't dying at the same rate" in his dataset and be technically correct. The elderly are not part of his dataset, so it's vacuously true.
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
I don’t think it’s any secret that the last two years have been poor for people’s mental & physical health. It stands to reason that we’re going to be feeling the consequences of the pandemic & pandemic mitigation efforts for quite some time.
He's literally claiming that elderly are not dying at the same rates, based on his internal customer data
My interpretation is that this guy runs an insurance company who insures working age people through their employers. That is the source of the data, so he is missing data on elderly people
Yet he makes a claim that the people he does not have data on are dying at a lower rate than the people he does have data on. This makes no sense, as you can't make a comparison when you simply don't have data on the group you're comparing against
>Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
Here is the specific part I take issue with:
>it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people
...deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18...
Davidson, the CEO in question, directly said "huge, huge numbers" and "primarily working-age people 18..." in his address. However the author of the article, Margaret Menge, added the "that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying" piece.
Essentially Margaret, as explained in another comment, used a literary construction to tie the quotes together. The sentence is being used to convey that contrary to the popular narrative that the pandemic is only killing the elderly, here we have evidence that it's affecting other cohorts as well.
Horrible reporting
For 2020 it was down a touch.
https://www.statnews.com/2021/11/16/the-pandemic-didnt-incre...
Per the original source data from the CDC [1]:
> For males, the age-adjusted suicide rate dropped 2%, from 22.4 per 100,000 in 2019 to 21.9 in 2020. Rates for males in age groups 10–14 and 25–34 increased by 13% and 5%, respectively, although only the 5% increase for those aged 25–34 (from 28.0 to 29.3) was significant. Rates for males aged 45–54, 55–64, and 65–74 declined (Figure 3). Although essentially unchanged from 2019, the rate for males aged 75 and over was the highest of all age groups at 40.2 in 2020.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR016.pdf
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...
For example, if those disabilities are due to long COVID, then that would indicate that the cure is indeed not worse than the problem itself, but rather that the problem is even worse than we thought.
Why is the total deaths up? Are cancer deaths going up because the system is stressed by COVID? Are the people who are dying people who had COVID, or people who didn't?
Are people dying because they have more stress and less exercise? Are people dying because of the restrictions due to the pandemic? Are people dying because they have lost their job and no longer have access to health care? Are people dying because of hidden effects of a vaccine? Are people dying because social isolation causes follow-on problems?
That's not even to talk about Fentanyl and meth addiction, as mentioned above, which seems to be a confounding factor that started before COVID.
Perhaps there is a complex interaction of issues that will lead everyone to their own interpretation.
This data doesn't tell us any of those things. And it certainly doesn't say, one way or the other, if the cure was worse than the disease, or even what cure we are talking about.
I interpreted it as deaths caused by Covid. Do you have a reason to interpret it differently?
https://hdpulse.nimhd.nih.gov/data/deathrates/index.php?stat...
If the average person had a 1/80 chance to die each year, the average life expectancy would be 40 years.
Think about this another way. You have a gun with 80 chambers and 1 bullet. How many times on average can you point it at your head and pull the trigger before it goes off? Would you still argue 80 times? On average it is the last chamber?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_distribution
Your gun example has a uniform distribution between 1 and 80 with an expected value of roughly 40 if you don't spin the chamber each time between pulling the trigger. If you spin it each time, then it's again the geometric distribution and the expected value is 80.
If you don't spin the chamber between each time, then each time you pull the trigger the probability of dying at that round is not 1/80, the probability goes up and up at each round, it's only 1/80 on the first round.
E = p/(1-p)
So pretty close to 80 years, no?
I guess it gets more complicated because you'd die of other reasons as you age so there's no point including the eventualities where you reached 120 for example... I guess it gets pretty complicated in the end...
The question is comparable to a gun with infinitely many chambers, each with a 1/80 chance of containing a bullet: How many times on average can you point it at your head and pull the trigger? The differences are that you have no guarantee that the first 80 chambers will contain exactly 1 bullet, that more than one chamber can contain a bullet, and that you can pull the trigger more than 80 times.
[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17495709/
Out of about 90, I can count 4. Graduated 1999. 1 in 200 per year sounds like it might be ballpark, though of course from my limited set it's hard to tell. Assuming the rate is low at around 40 but a fair bit lower when you've just graduated, and a fair bit higher as you pass 60.
A death rate of 20% isn’t bad if it’s a rare disease that has a 10 cases worldwide (2 deaths), whereas a 0.2% death rate is devastating for a highly contagious virus that spreads rapidly over the planet (millions of deaths)
>>“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.”
In fact, it was the entire point of the article - this disease is so bad because the entire population of people is subject to infection, and the death and disability rate is very substantial.
>>whereas a 0.2% death rate is devastating for a highly contagious virus that spreads rapidly over the planet (millions of deaths)
We've got that. Here. In this topic and case.
So, I'm really struggling to see the point of the comment. ?
There probably is an IQ drop, but I question this figure. I recall a study doing the rounds here which showed this figure as a ballpark and it was very low quality.
Even if the effects are temporary, and even if it's "only five points", I'm not interested in that risk, and you shouldn't be either.
> 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.
>>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 group they are suddenly below is not that large. Either way, both the studies about the CV-19 clotting issues and mini-strokes, and that it is now known to infect, thrive in, and kill central nervos system cells is really scary.
Just the fact that one of the first things to go is the sense of smell - that's one of the oldest and most core neural pathways, leading right into the brain core. And the phnomena of patients recovering their sense of smell for a while and then it going off so that every smell/taste is like gasoline or rotting pork so they lose 30Lbs in 3 months is horrifying enough, but when I consider what it's likely doing to the brain (neuroscience was my minor in college), that just gives me the creeps. I'll take plague instead, thanks, at least it's just ordinary misery.
Edit: Here's a new interesting point - "Long covid with neuro symptoms:
Not real enough to be factored in to disease prevention plans
Real enough for drug trials"
https://twitter.com/DFisman/status/1477732646130106368
So last year more covid deaths (particularly among the elderly), but while those numbers have declined, the numbers from younger "working age" people have increased more than enough to make up for it.
> "Just 8.9% of ICU beds are available at hospitals in the state, a low for the year, and lower than at any time during the pandemic. But the majority of ICU beds are not taken up by COVID-19 patients – just 37% are, while 54% of the ICU beds are being occupied by people with other illnesses or conditions."
Well a lot of people were avoiding medical care (precisely because of Covid concerns), so this makes some sense. Couple that with the increased death rate for younger people and something has happened to worsen the health and outcomes generally for that population. Cue wild speculation and theories.
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.
I'll definitely recommend LSD or mushrooms, though. They are lots of fun.
People do not die from smoking opium, much. But die a lot from popping pills.
Concentrated synthetic opioids are deadly.
This is a cruel twist, given that suicide deaths actually decreased in 2020[1], probably for the reason you've mentioned: spending nearly all of your time with others makes you accountable and removes opportunities for self-harm.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR016.pdf
Never would have seen it coming that encouraging people to stay isolated for years at a time and actively fearing their own proximity to one another would be detrimental.
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 socially connected have become more socially connected, while the millions who already struggled with disconnection or loneliness have become even more strained at the behest of numerous politicians who mandate their "rules for thee and not for me" under the new anxiety-laced normal.
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.
The vulnerable and poorest suffer the most.
Don’t blame this on capitalism; this is a fact of nature. That humans have cobbled together a wealthy civilization capable of actually attempting to provide some measure of care for the weak is a staggering miracle.
We’re capable of doing far more to care for people than we do. The amount that we do is practically nothing in the US.
Europe seems to do a reasonably good job. Apologies if you were posting from a more socially sofisticated state. I kind of assumed and I usually try not to do that.
So the poor still suffered only they were politically poor not cash poor.
Capitalism has it's problems but so do all systems. Allocating resources is a very hard problem.
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_...
Not only that but the lockdowns making people low-key depressed which would also be a reason for using addictive substances since they often go hand-in-hand together.
I could be pretty much classified an alcoholic during most of 2019-2020 because a six-pack a day keeps the boredom away.
For anyone reading who thinks that may apply to them: Talk to your doctor. "Cold Turkey" alcohol withdrawals can kill.
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.
“ The synthetic and highly addictive drug has claimed more lives than COVID-19, auto crashes, gun violence, cancer and suicide in the year 2020.”
https://www.abc12.com/news/fentanyl-number-one-cause-of-deat...
The article appears to attribute all accidental poisoning to fentanyl. That seems like an error.
I don't think it does. Sure, they throw out the 100k overdoses number at the end, which isn't specific to fentanyl, but the other numbers they cite are around 40k/year and a run rate of 64k/year by Deceber 2021.
Current data is here:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm
It's about 62k deaths from synthetic opioids/year (excluding methadone) at the end of the series-- the vast majority of these are fentanyl. Plus a bunch of heroin deaths which are rapidly becoming "really fentanyl" deaths. And that's up to April, not December.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S0szR2Ua9v0Sr91YhDD7gPrXsDk...
Topic 1 is on ages 18-45: more deaths from fentanyl than from...
The later topics are on all ages.
The fact sheet attributes 24k deaths in the age range to fentanyl in 2019. WISQARS accidental injuries from poisoning in the age range were 38k in 2019. 2/3rds in that age range being fentanyl is totally plausible.
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D157;jsessioni... has the broken down data. They have 36,907 deaths in 2020 from 18-45 with T40.4-- "other synthetic opioids excluding methadone". FAF is calling all deaths from synthetic opioids fentanyl, which isn't quite true but it's very likely close to true.
Edit: The reporting in this article is remarkably bad: it confuses a two-year range (Jan-2020 to Dec-2021) with a one-year range, and itself contains a number that's nowhere near the number of COVID deaths:
> The drug has taken just shy of 80,000 people's lives between January 2020 and December 2021.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...
[2]: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211122/us-covid-deaths-202...
All these media reports were all influenced by this underlying factsheet from FAF.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S0szR2Ua9v0Sr91YhDD7gPrXsDk...
Broadly, it appears true: fentanyl deaths look like they outweigh all those things in the younger population. And it doesn't look implausible that synthetic opioids could have killed a total of 64k across the entire population in 2021. (I think they were comparing trailing-twelve-month data from two dates in each case..)
edit, 3mins: I was distracted and my previous version of this reply was word salad.
The CDC's death count with age breakdowns[1] shows that over twice as many people aged 18-64 died of COVID-19 than drug overdoes, combined across 2020 and 2021. That flips when you limit it to just 18-45, which is the statistic FAF is using.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
You know, people need an anchor point for comparison very often.
"Holy shit COVID and car crashes are bad, and among younger adults -- believe it or not-- fentanyl is even worse".
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 help people understand the magnitude of something, but at the same time convey a misunderstanding, or short-circuit reasoning as well.
This is precisely why it is a common sales tactic: Go into a jewelry store asking for a nice watch as a present, and you may be shown a $3k watch. Way over your budget, so when you ask to be shown a something else a $700 watch seems like a much better deal, even if it might still be a bit more than you wanted to spend. Maybe the third watch will be an ugly one for $400 to help convince you that you need to spend more, putting both an upper & lower bound on the purchase.
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 premature death shot way up, passing traffic accidents and suicide, which we all know are really bad in that age group". And maybe "wow, fentanyl is even bigger than COVID as a cause of death among young adults".
It doesn't make me take traffic safety less seriously, either.
Look, I ain't got time each year to compute loss-of-life expectancy numbers, and decide how preventable each and every cause is, and then come up with an analytical ranking of each cause and its "importance" (I did this at one point, but I'm not going to repeat it to understand trends).
I don't work in public health, either. Approximation based on reasonable anchor points and understood risks is just fine.
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.
I've never heard the "no big deal" one. I've heard another: If responses to COVID have worsened the opioid crisis, that's a cost that should be counted against COVID mitigation measures.
(I still think this is faulty: I don't think responses to COVID have done much to change the opioid crisis. But at least this is a rational argument and open to debate).
Heck, at the very beginning people saying that sort of thing by comparison to the flu. That line of thinking went away when deaths far exceeded annual flu deaths, but with the (possible) decrease in severe cases with Omicron I've seen hints of this argument again.
Well, at some point, it's a reasonable argument. Risk isn't going to go to 0. It looks like with vaccination my personal risk is 2-3x influenza, but I may be overstating it.
At some point, we're going to just have to give up and assume risks. I'm not routinely wearing masks 3 years from now.
Another confounding variable are testing rates: Mandatory testing is in place to a significant degree more than last year, so it is difficult to tell how many more positive tests this year are simply due to mandatory testing. For example, they're required for air travel and about 3x more people traveled this year for the holidays. This is speculation though: Relevant data would be at least in part include asymptomatic case rates from year to year, but I couldn't find a good source for that. Information like [0] are very promising but still indicate that it's too early to tell.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
>At some point, we're going to just have to give up and assume risks. I'm not routinely wearing masks 3 years from now.
Mostly agreed, though as variants come & go I won't be surprised if some variants create "mask seasons" as they rise & fall. In retrospect even pre-covid it seems odd that it was deemed acceptable to go into work when you were sick with a cold or flu-- not necessarily even for severe health risks, but just as a matter of common courtesy. Of course changing that behavior in the long term would also require society (again, I'm in the US) to rethink things like what constitutes a reasonable amount of paid sick time. That is an especially problematic area when workplaces mandate 5/10/14 days of isolation but don't cover it with paid leave. My workplace does not cover that time if an employee is already out of paid sick leave. In the past, when going in to work when you were sick was somewhat optional, that made a little more sense. Now, telling someone they're losing 4% of their annual income due to a mandatory 14 day isolation period w/o pay is... I'm not sure I have a good word for it, but it feels wrong.
Also lots of families getting together had agreed to get themselves tested before hand.
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?
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.
They were trending up but there was a very sharp increase once the epidemic started.
>- The degree to which fentanyl is lacing other street drugs is unprecedented and seemingly independent of lockdown.
There was precedent before 2019. Seemingly independent growth that's also parabolic during 2020? Unlikely
>- Look, we don't really have "lockdown" anymore.
The genie is out of the bottle once people relapse. Maybe you don't realize how dependent recovering addicts are on rehab programs and social connections to stay clean. For some people giving them a steady unemployment income and forcing them to isolate is basically a death sentence. This was a predicted outcome during the start of the isolation.
Opioid deaths increased 1014% from 2013 to 2019. This is an average compound growth rate of 46.8% per year over that span.
Opioid deaths increased by about 50% from 2019 to 2020.
It looks like they increased by less than 40% from 2020 to 2021. So over the past 2 years we have had the same increase rate as from the entire span.
The data don't support your assertions.
Visualizing the trend, the cause is debatable: extrapolating from the trend that was in place as of March 2020 [0] leads to a similar place we're at now, and we can't know if that would otherwise have levelled off. There was a sharper uptick in April/May, but not a significant variation from the smoother curve that would have fit previous data.
>The genie is out of the bottle once people relapse.
You would still expect there to be a noticeable decline: Fewer people starting down the addiction pipeline to begin with, more people that are already addicts starting to get the help they need again. There should be a noticeable decline as people reconnect to support services, and we haven't seen that yet. Maybe it's just too early to tell, but social awareness of the opioid crisis was at an all-time high in 2019/early-2020, Rx access to them was already severely limited for the previous few years, and in mid-2019 a trend that had been pretty flat for ~2 years started to significantly increase. I'm sure COVID didn't help, but there was significant upwards pressure before that and disentangling the two is not a straightforward task.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm
And if this sales tactic would be applied to any security issue you can more or less forget about civil liberties.
The framing is relevant since the increase is arguably a product of the lockdown/social isolation. Generally it's not Boomers or the upperclass who are having to deal with opiate addiction. Is it a coincidence that their needs once again supersede the needs of others? Maybe
Funny use of the word 'synthetic' to add extra spookiness. Something like 60% of first-world medicines are natural origin or secondary metabolites of natural origin - the other 40% are all synthetic. [1]
[1] https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/br.2017.909
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid#Semisynthetic_and_synth...
I am not a doctor: Of the very powerful "powder" drugs heroin is the safest as it has very little effect on the involuntary respiratory system which is the route that opiates take to kill. "Nodding off" on synthetic opiates leads commonly to death (which is why you always prod a sleeping junky - wake up!!) but not so much on heroin.
But it is much safer to smoke opium, if you wish to have such a habit. Much less chance of death and disease.
So, you cruel, nay, sadistic lawmakers: Legalise opium!
But people popping pills are nearly invisible and die quietly - people smoking opium fill up establishments, make funny smells and do not conveniently die off in the corner.....
Natural opioids: codeine, morphine.
Semi-synthetic opioids: heroin, hydromorphone, hydrocodone, oxycodone, etc.
Synthetic opioids: methadone (though this is usually excluded from the reporting of "synthetic opioid overdose deaths" for various reasons), demerol, fentanyl, lots of -fentanyl analogs, etc.
https://api.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/23/facebook-p...
[2] Most fentanyl (+ precursors) is manufactured in China and then comes across the southern border from Mexico.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/28/fda-janet-wo...
[2] (PDF) https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...
If opiate deaths are a problem, tobacco ones are a 7x larger problem.
To be clear, this is false. Fentanyl overdoses (according to that article) have killed about 80,000 people in a year in the US whereas COVID-19 has killed more than 386,000. It's nowhere close. And that is not to mention all of the people COVID-19 has permanently disabled.
I know the article has some quantifiers elsewhere that could be used to form a true statement if included. But as stated, that is false and it's being used to mislead people into think COVID-19 isn't that serious.
Hell, in British Columbia there have been more drug overdoses than Covid deaths across all ages.
Why in the world would a dealer put fent into coke. I guess a speedball feels great but the average weekend partier doing a bump or a pill are not looking to walk that death tightrope.
Just sad all around and we still have a long way to go with stigma and science based treatment.
If you happen to be in that scene might be a good idea to start carrying naloxone.
Would also love to see over the counter narcan. suboxone for any who wants it without the compliance burden.
[1] https://www.cvs.com/content/prescription-drug-abuse/save-a-l...
There's a drug test site in my city that regularly posts examples of what they find on twitter. Totally random ultra dangerous poisons in party drugs. All the time.
Here's an example: a drug not safe for humans in a test sample of MDMA. https://twitter.com/GYDTcanada/status/1477444546480984065?s=...
People are dying because they're doing some thing and they have no idea what it is. It's impossible to use drugs safely in such a situation.
Yes these are "overdoses" but when the contents of the drug is not truly what the drug user is told, the drug user has no way to know what the safe dose is of the drug they are using.
Drug use has become a game of russian roulette as no one has any knowledge of what is in the drugs and there's no real safe dosage.
Each these conditions doesn't just reduce lifespan. They also put people in a more fragile life-situation where they need more support. And the US hasn't been at maintaining those kinds of support during the epidemic.
Edit: The US life expectancy decline relative to other advanced nations is relevant. Take a look at the following chart in detail. US life expectancy was set back twenty years. No other nation was set by more than ten years.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-lif...
However if you want to solve obesity, especially the morbid obesity shamming will never resolve that as chances are the obesity is cased by an underlying metal or medical issue. most often an anxiety disorder of some kind, and socially shaming someone that suffers from anxiety is not going to cure them, and in fact will most likely make their eating disorder worse.
Yes, I’m aware of the twinkie diet guy. Most people aren’t the twinkie diet guy.
Also my experience as a Midwesterner, is the people of the Midwest enjoy sugary beverages far too much (I say that as someone that should be drinking water but instead am enjoying a glass of very sweet tea). I would say if the average Midwesterner cut out 60% of the sugary drinks the obesity problem would take a big hit.
So I disagree that we in the Midwest lack access to affordable, healthy food
I've heard that, but I'm not necessarily sure it's true. All of the lower socio-economic areas I've lived in (in Melbourne, may be different in the US) have had an amazing selection of dirt-cheap fruit, vegetables, dried legumes and fish that are easily accessible in the main shopping area.
Often we're talking "cash only" businesses that avoid tax in order to lower the prices further, and they're always offering a ridiculous deal on in-season produce. We're talking, in AUD, $5/kg for fish, $2/kg for vegetables, $1/kg for fruit. The dried stuff doesn't go on special, but it's usually dirt cheap anyway ($15 for a 5kg bag, once you rehydrate it you get something like 20kg of chickpeas or lentils).
Lack of access to these markets is something I miss now that I'm no longer so close to Dandy/Sunshine.
Convenience/time is a big issue, but its not like the upscale versions of fast food are really that better for you.
It's a cultural thing. Nobody eating a big mac for dinner every night would switch to kale salad from Whole Foods if they got a raise. America never had a good food culture and what little we even had was based on stay-at-home wife.
Money isn't the reason why lower class Hispanic and Asian areas can support grocers with quality produce, but white lower class areas don't.
Half my families "recipes" originated on mass produced canned/boxed food labels. My grandmas chicken and rice dish calls for cambells and uncle bens. Regardless, I love it anyway.
I think I’d say more that you can’t be morbidly obese and healthy. Fat people can be healthy (just probably less likely to be healthy than someone at a “typical” weight.
Too bad this podcast’s website is crap for linking to specific episodes. Check the ep from a few weeks ago: Is Being Fat Bad For You?
https://www.maintenancephase.com/
A tangential relative died a couple of months ago from a drug overdose. Her immediate family tells everyone she died from the COVID vaccine.
Apparently now it's a thing among families who can't come to grips with a drug death to blame the new vaccines. I wonder if this is where the conspiracy theorists get their ammunition.
Changes in death rates directly relate to relative vaccination rates. Vaccination was initially rolled out to the elderly they where also more willing to get vaccinated. It’s strange to think that 75 year olds grew up in a time period where several horrific diseases disappeared due to vaccination efforts. It it’s clear they have a lot more faith in vaccination.
https://data.cdc.gov/Vaccinations/COVID-19-Vaccination-and-C...
Let's assume deaths for older people haven't changed so the increase is entirely among the younger group.
x: younger y: older
1.4x + y = 1350 x + y = 1319 0.4x = 31 x = 77.5 (younger 2020) 1.4x = 108.5 (younger 2021) y = 1241.5 (older 2020 and 20201)
So assuming no increase in non-COVID deaths in the older group, we have 77.5 deaths in 2020 and 108.5 deaths in 2021 in the younger demographic. The actual numbers would be even lower since there have obviously been deaths in the older population.
Unless I am embarrassingly wrong on the calculation, these figures don't make sense. The source says this 40% increase figure is based on his life insurance customers who are “primarily working-age people 18 to 64”. This being just among his policy holders could explain the tiny absolute figures in the younger group. But where are the numbers for the older group coming from? His statement doesn't exclude the possibility of policies for ages < 18 and > 64. But if that's a small fraction of their customer base, it would imply a huge death rate for the older policy holders.
These numbers seem very fishy. Even if his older members are dying at astronomical rates and his numbers are correct, this is about as far from a representative sample as you could get and cannot be extrapolated to the general population. And I assume that's what the source means when he says "the increase in deaths represents huge, huge numbers."
By the way, I am not implying that there hasn't been an increase in non-COVID deaths among the young and old in these last two years. We know that's the because there is actually real data on this that the article could have included.
Something similar happened in my town when I saw a huge-looking spike in a graph of covid deaths. But when I looked closer, deaths had spiked from 0 to 3 on a particular day, and the average is 0.3/day. So that crazy looking spike is probably meaningless over a longer time window.
Not sure how your first two sentences above aren't speculation. It's like you're preemptively attack all the other speculation as "wild".
There is uncertainty in many areas of life, but this seems like one thing we don’t have to speculate about. We will not only have definitive data [1] within a couple years, but also annual [2] and weekly [3] provisional data much sooner.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm
[3]: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Provisional-Counts-of-Death...
Without knowing anything else, I seriously doubt that is statistically significant.
The normal pre-COVID ICU bed occupancy rate was somewhere near 57-82% (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840149/). 54% is quite low. I suspect that the bar for getting into an ICU bed has been raised by the number of COVID patients.
BTW, Indiana has ~1,940 ICU beds (https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/indiana-releases-specific...). In numbers, that means
* ~173 are unoccupied,
* ~718 are occupied by COVID patients, and
* ~1048 are occupied by non-COVID patients.
It's literally the population, not a sample.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/fentanyl-seizur...
Specially if you consider that the overdose deaths did not suddenly appear in 2020.
In teenagers this has already caused a spike in mental illnesses.
Have a look at the picture on this page to see how much lethal it is : https://www.bioonesantaclarita.com/biohazard-and-crime-scene...
For those confused by the P2P acronym as I was, it's apparently a synthesis route that was developed in response to the crackdowns on OTC ephedrine products. It's apparently a lot more pure than the older stuff, at least according to https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
https://www.amazon.com/Least-Us-Tales-America-Fentanyl/dp/16...
It's a devastating read.
Methamphetamine is methamphetamine and there is no "new meth"
It's simply a higher amount of R-meth and less L-meth(the non psychoactive isomer)
Don't believe everything you read
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fentanyl-overdose-death/
https://www.abc12.com/news/fentanyl-number-one-cause-of-deat...
Feels like the insurance guy at this press conference is trying to 'scare' young folks into getting the vaccine.
My question is, the life insurance company would see all the death certificates, if they don't say Covid, what do they say?
There's narrow circumstances where they might make sense, but that's about it.
Covid is quite capable of killing with a clot when your symptoms aren't to the point that you'll be in the hospital these days. This will show up as a stroke or a heart attack or pulmonary embolism--and if the docs don't put in the effort they won't know it was Covid (and for that matter it can't be proven anyway--lethal clots happen even without Covid. While it's a reasonable presumption that Covid caused the clot there's no proof in any given case.) There's also a lot of families that don't want Covid on the death certificate--even more reason the clot won't be attributed to Covid.
(And, yes, there are plenty of other ways clots can kill--I'm just looking at the cases that are likely to kill without ever reaching the hospital.)
Undertakers have also been noticing this--lots of bodies showing Covid clotting even though they aren't reported as Covid deaths.
Edit: I forgot an additional factor. If you do survive your Covid hospital stay you have a substantially elevated all-cause mortality rate at least for the next year. AFIAK the mechanism has not yet been identified.
This sounds very strange indeed, I'd like to see the numbers. For instance Euromomo https://www.euromomo.eu collects the statistics about death rates, here is a plot for the Italian death rate and you can see the mortality spikes with the covid waves, but those are quite specific for the elderly https://imgur.com/a/8cUdNcb
It sounds very strange that the death spike is "over" 3 sigma, which should mean over 3 standard deviations, which is really unbelievable, to me this looks like an artefact of some sort
Why does the fact that it is larger than 3 standard deviations suggest to you that it must be an artifact? If the death rate is normally very stable then the standard deviation will be small, so it will be easy for any unusual increase to exceed that.
variance and standard deviation don't only apply to normal distributions. and "sigma" is the symbol normally used for variance regardless of the underlying distribution.
> I'm assuming
sigh.
However, in everyday usage, saying something is a "2 or 3 sigma" event nearly always refers to a normal distribution unless otherwise noted, because otherwise that information doesn't really tell you anything. Is only with a specific distribution that can imply a percentage likelihood, e.g. 5% for a 2 sigma event or .3% for a 3 sigma event. Also, if you're looking at at annual probability, 1-in-200 year event would correspond to just about 3 sigma on a normal distribution.
Sigh
That is, when generally looking over any death rates in a relatively large population, most deaths in a given year are uncorrelated, so things look like a normal distribution. Obviously with a transmissible virus, the fact that two people died in the same year of Covid is correlated.
Similarly, if you did the math from the insurance company's data, I'd bet you'd find the chance of everybody dying in the same year would be like 1 in many, many trillions of years. But of course things like supervolcanos or meteor strikes are possible. Those aren't non-random, it's just that everyone's death would correlate with that single event.
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.
Of course, I think it's very fair to say the devastation from a war is much worse than Covid (a war destroys infrastructure and primarily kills the young), but from a pure "number of deaths" perspective I think most people have a huge difficulty comprehending the severity of the pandemic.
Some 55 million people die each year. An extra 5 million is a big deal, yes, but there's almost 8 billion people on the planet. I think most people have a huge difficulty comprehending just how many humans there are on earth.
People reporting on deaths have to average over a period, otherwise you find deaths drop on weekends and spike on mondays because that's when the paperwork gets processed. In this case, they're averaging over an entire quarter.
I could well believe that the variance in death rates between Q4 2008 and Q4 2018 had a standard deviation of 3% - an entire quarter is a lot of averaging.
It's not an artifact, it's incorrect modeling. If they're talking about sigmas, then they're modeling deaths as being normally distributed. But deaths aren't normally distributed, as you can tell by glancing at a graph of deaths over time: there's way more probability mass in the extremes than you would expect from a normal distribution. This sort of thing (modelling something poorly, then getting all surprised when reality violates your model) is depressingly common.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat...
Death rates for an age range (like 18-45) are likely to be much more stable.
Also, pretty dubious about that specific dataset - it looks like it includes linear interpolations between a much smaller set of actual datapoints, so not sure you can use it to infer the actual distribution of death rate statistics
Do you have a data set for this to look at? I'm skeptical that death rates of any kind are close to normally distributed. If nothing else, there are big spikes during plagues, like the black plague and spanish flu.
And it is indeed a very high rate.
The insurance guy was civilized enough not to complain that his company's incurring lots of losses -- getting hammered by writing lots of checks to survivors. But surely that's how an insurance company knows what's going on.
It makes no sense for an executive of a mutual insurance company to sling bs about this kind of loss. Because auditors.
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.
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.
Why people were picketing a hospital with “sacrifice the weak” signs was very puzzling. But they were!
https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data?fbclid=IwAR2pRUq9GN9EEoDTm0...
Edit: ...as the parent comment was downvoted when I wrote this
Also people in ICU with covid may not be the same thing as people in ICU because of covid. It may likely just be that very sick people in hospitals are refusing the vaccine and catching it. Hospitals are confined spaces that aid in transmission of all kinds of diseases.
The difference is 40 people out of a population of 14.5 million. So small it could literally be people with terminal diseases catching covid on their death beds.
To use this to advocate for any preventative effect in a healthy individual in the general population would be misleading. Very likely the difference is just sampling bias.
The simple explanation, that getting a vaccination that prevents or reduces the impact of a disease makes more sense. To the point that it’s a no-brainer.
It’s a moot point now, as this phase of the pandemic is played out. People embraced fear, ignorance and doubt in the name of freedom. Many will needlessly suffer as a result.
The anti-vax crowd conveniently ignores that detail, and unfortunately the people who give them credence are paying the price through needless suffering or even death.
They have graphs with excess deaths by age groups and you can see that 2021 looks worse than 2020, with a noticeable upwards trend starting around week 16 of 2021.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/analysis-thousands-more-usual-dyi...
Mainstream articles are biased with the spin of the situation but the facts are there. It goes over some causes of deaths - mostly heart/clotting issues, exactly what you’d expect from the vaxx. That’s why we call it the “clot-shot”
In England people who took the vaxx are twice as likely to die as those who don’t:
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adult...
If you want an opposing view of that data read this fact-check:
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-coronavirus-britai...
Notice how they don’t deny the statistic. They just say it’s taken “out of context” because covid deaths, and vaccines save lives. No matter how they spin it they can’t deny government data says vaccinated 18-59 are much more likely to die. That’s a fact, even though it’s marked as false by Reuters.
The statistic that vaccinated people 18-59 are dying at twice the rate presumably true, so of course the reuters article doesn't deny it. The Reuters article presents a totally believable explanation, which is also in the original article's comments. What they are saying is that this can be true for the age range 18-59, but simultaneously not be true for any specific age brackets within that range.
This is called Simpson's paradox. The explanation is that vaccination rates are higher among the elderly than among the young, and that the elderly have a higher baseline rate of death, and the Reuters article breaks out the numbers to demonstrate this. What's the big mystery exactly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
150 out of 2500 unvaxxed deaths in 18-59
100 out of 500 vaxxed deaths in 18-59 (higher rate)
But: 150 of 500 unvaxxed deaths in 50-59
100 of 500 vaxxed deaths in 50-59 (lower rate)
It would be true that more vaxxed people died than unvaxxed in the 18-59 age group without the vaccine causing any death, but only because the larger number of surviving young people swamps the higher relative death rates among the higher relative vaxxed elderly.
They are not BS.
Each of your references are saying completely different things.
1) non-covid excess mortality
2) mortality rate between those vaxxed and not vaxxed.
3) Reteurs was not 'debunking' point 2 or point 1. They are 'debunking' crap statements on Joe Rogan Podcast about the absollute numbers of those dying from COVID in general.
Alex Berenson is terribly misrepresenting information.
So when you say "That's a Fact" - you don't even seem to be sure what facts you're referring to, and they are obviously taken out of context, at face value.
A)
For point 3, the Reuters debunking of 'Most of the COVID deaths are those vaccinated' (Alex Berenson on Joe Rogan Podcast misinformation).
Suppose 100% of the citizens of the UK are vaccinated.
The vaxx is good, but not perfect - so some will die.
Are you going to run around saying '100% of those dying were vaccinated - therefore the vaxx is crap'.
That would be 'a fact' i.e. '100% of deaths are those who are vaccinated'.
But how helpful is that fact? It's not.
It'd be like saying '99% of those dying from car accidents were wearing seatbelts, therefore seat-belts are dangerous'
B)
Data point 2, which shows that 'Vaxxed people aged 10-59 are dying at 2x the rate those unvaxxed' - is also misleading.
(FYI they are talking about 'death rates' not absolute deaths, which is why it's different than the Joe Rogan Podcast misinformation.)
The likelihood of someone being vaccinated goes up dramatically with their likelihood of dying from COVID.
59-year-olds are vaxxed at a much higher rate than 10 or 20 year olds.
Especially those with underlying conditions.
And it's going to be overwhelmingly people in those situations that die from COVID.
Here's an analogy:
People aged 50+ and those 30+ with underlying conditions are going for a 'dangerous car ride'.
Everyone else is going for a 'safe car ride'.
Everyone is asked to wear their seatbelts.
Some people, particularly those going on the 'safe car ride' - are not wearing seatbelts.
As a result: all the 'big crashes' are in the 'dangerous car-ride' cohort.
That means almost all of the deaths will be among those who are wearing seatbelts, because, well, they were going on a 'dangerous car ride'.
The kids who didn't bother to wear seatbelts, were mostly going on the 'safe ride' and there were not many accidents at all.
If we popularized the notion of 'People with seatbelts more likely to die' - it would be totally misleading, because people would come to believe that 'Seatbelts Kill You' - when, the total opposite is true - seatbelts save lives.
...
People that are smart enough to know the difference, and continue to propagate it, are deliberately misleading people.
People that aren't bright enough (or don't have the time) to spot the difference ... shouldn't be propagating information.
This is the only intelligent response to explain why overall mortality is 2X higher in the vaxxed group.
I agree with you this could be an explanation. The problem is it still completely destroys the idea that unvaccinated are the ones who should be restricted from society. It shows your age is more important than vaccine status. Someone being obese or not is also more important than vaccine status. Whether you had prior infection is more important than vaccine status.
If it was true that the vaccine was so NEEDED you had to mandate it for the younger age groups, take away their civil liberties without a regular testing option then you’d have to make a strong case those age groups are dying in large numbers. They aren’t - and that’s how I interpret this statistic.
I think there are many other ways to prove hundreds of thousands have died from the vaccine. Here are some more:
http://www.skirsch.com/covid/Deaths.pdf
Seatbelts don’t cause myocarditis. The vaccine can cause adverse events and the way these are being discounted is inhumane. All this while it doesn’t even stop spread… the most vaccinated places have the highest case counts per million. Yet governments are pushing more mandates making unvaccinated second-class citizens. MISInformation stands for Massively Important Statistical Information… and I’m going to spread it as long as governments try to ruin my life for a personal medical decision.
EDIT: I swear they changed that fact check. Read it again - it used to link exactly where I linked to. I guess it was easier to debunk something else
It does not really need an explanation.
We already have conclusive data of the power of vaccines.
" The problem is it still completely destroys the idea that unvaccinated are the ones who should be restricted from society."
No it doesn't.
COVID spreads quickly among the young and old.
There is no way to systmatically just keep the vulnerable in a bubble. We can reduce their interactivity, but if COVID is widespread, that won't protect them or anyone.
Vaccines reduce spread significantly, which is why we want everyone to get them.
If you want to drive in the winter, in Canada you need to 1) have insurance 2) pass a test and 3) have winter tires 4) have your car up to a bunch of standards.
And you cannot drink and drive.
Those curtailments of your civil liberties exist because you can screw up other people's lives.
That link doesn’t “prove” anything. By its own admission, it’s a “hypothesis”, and it’s based on a number of questionable assumptions, including assuming there’s a 41x multiplier of reported anaphylactic events immediately after vaccination, (plausible), assuming it’s comparable to a multiplier of reported deaths over a much longer time period (not plausible), and then assuming what percentages of those multiplied unreported deaths are “legitimate” based on a host of small sample sizes that, even if they are accurate (another assumption), we have no idea if they are representative enough to accurately scale to much larger numbers (completely implausible)
Besides, the theory doesn’t even pass the smell test. The months last year with the lowest excess deaths in the US - March and April - just happen to be the months with the highest numbers of administered covid vaccine doses
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=~USA
Note that it’s possible the vaccines are less safe than advertised and that adverse events and even deaths are more common than acknowledged (and that vaccine mandates are wrong), and for those true numbers to be much smaller than 150,000
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/life-expectancy-in-u-s-decl...
This is for 2020 - COVID-19 deaths are more for 2021.
Really wild numbers if you think about it.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
Suicide, flu and car crashes caused less deaths than usual where I am, and the lockdowns led a negative value for 'excess deaths'. I'm in New Zealand.
But one thing we probably can agree on is that at this point covid is endemic and most people have given up trying to get to zero cases.
For me, I personally just integrated into my worldview the fact that I can’t trust most humans to give a shit about others (like following simple mask and vaccine guidelines) and have to protect my family however best I can, even if that means less social interaction for the rest of my life.
There is an assumption here that the lockdowns have reduced the number of COVID deaths. That is not necessarily the case, and actually the evidence points to the contrary: looking at state data, it looks like strict lockdown policies taken in some states in the US were ineffective at best, and may have been harmful.
https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/covid-19-vaccine-claims...
https://www.health.gov.au/news/reduction-in-threshold-of-no-...
"The evidence requirements for claims $20,000 and over, including death and broader operation of the scheme will be published shortly. Claims relating to a death will not require evidence of hospitalisation."
In the US, it looks like suicides fell slightly, according to provisional data:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR016.pdf
Even if these statistics are updated upward, I don't see how they can be interpreted as skyrocketing.
Please do your best to stick to facts and source them when convenient.
Have to look at the numbers to understand
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...
Blaming life expectancy drop on "undetected" covid without any evidence is not very scientific. I can say it's undetected drug overdoses too.
Maybe either root the logic in facts, or don't write off alternative possibilities.
https://rumble.com/vpnxkr-are-these-side-effects-extremely-r...
(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.
More common than in general population?
Among people under 35 (most athletes) athletes are at significantly higher risk. It's possible tables turn later in life, can't really find a source. Anecdotally I knew two people growing up who died suddenly of congenital heart issues, and both were athletes.
Even if the data is biased, it's still useful when you account for the biases. What are you proposing is the bias for 2021?
[1] https://byrambridle.com/
Too often (omicron is 72% of cases) unbelievable numbers are, in fact, not to be believed.
However, it's obvious Omicron is absolutely exploding--the testing system is completely swamped at this point so we don't know the real rate. That's enough to say that by now the 72% likely is right.
I'm not suggesting they are suppressing or missing anything, but I would suggest we stay open to both possibilities.
In other words: because of selection at the gate for long life you can get up to 50-70% lower premiums than the standard table assumes. So this insurer is having quite the scare.
It’s one of the reasons why many EU insurers have balanced portfolios (and are strongly favored by regulation to be balanced). Long life, short life, pensions all in a basket with reinsurance to get these risks of the books. Throw in some P&C and A&H books as well (lower incidence of traffic accidents for example) and the company could be robust to corona. Now the interest rate and inflation, that’s a different story.
What I don’t under from the article: they mention a $100 million loss on disability, but the effect of this size on mortality should be many billions.
I sort of agree that the insurance financial risks associated with a low mortality population can be high in unusual situations, but it's not a blanket explanation for any particular situation.
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 even pass muster that a 10% increase in deaths would be a “once in 200 years” event. When has there ever been a 200 year period without major war, disease or disaster? What exactly are they smoking?
I just don't take it seriously anymore. Track 200 factors, 200 businesses, or 200 industries and you will see 1 event per year. Track all of the above and you will see 40,000 such events in a year.
More to the point, their actuarial model was probably wrong, not reality. Somewhere buried in their model were assumptions excluding black swan events
Where are you getting these numbers? I know multiple people in the US who have needed a COVID ICU bed, and they certainly weren't paying $100k out of pocket to do so. In most areas of the US, $100k could buy you a small house.
I've known of quite a few deaths of youngish people recently and only one was COVID related. Car crashes, ODs and other medical issues. Like I've known two girls both about 30 that died unexpectedly of non-covid medical issues last year.
2) If you go into the ICU for Covid you're probably leaving via the morgue. The survival chance for a Covid patient in the ICU is a lot lower than the typical ICU patient.
You may be interested to see Kaiser Permanente's recent study, suggesting that more than one in 2,000 young men are experiencing untimely heart disease with a known cause: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268209v...
The person that sold that idea cashed out and left the company long ago.
E.g. a "once in 200 years drought" in California might happen at the same time as a "once in 200 years over-mortality event" in Indiana.
News would tend to report on these, so we see many of these even though they are rare.
Think of the number of hundred year floods you see reported on each year. Then look at the number of floodplains that your news source would report on...
I wonder if the 1 in 200 year example wasn't communicated very well; it could be the actuaries view a long-lasting 10% increase to be the 1 in 200 year event; it does sound low for a single year stress.
It's a case where highly-educated people often make errors that laypersons would not.
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.
Regardless, we should be skeptical of the assumption that we're dealing with a normal distribution.
Nonlinearity Breeds Contempt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6eX6KaSBjc&list=LL&index=32...
I'm not saying that they're actively lying, but it seems some assumptions in these frequentist's numbers are just not correct.
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'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.)
https://retractionwatch.com/2021/10/01/criticism-engulfs-pap...
Past performance is not indicative of future results.
I don't know if it's a once in 200 years event or not, but this is a US insurance company, presumably talking about numbers in the US. Aside from ww2, in which the US had around 400,000 deaths, the number of Americans who have died in wars or disasters has been fairly small relatively.
Even the 400,000 for WW2 was over four years, whereas the US has had around 400,000 covid deaths a year for the last two years, and even more if you just look at excess mortality (however the population is obviously larger now than during ww2).
"Experts" making such a statement usually assume the variable in question to be standard distributed – which is close enough to the truth for non-extreme outcomes. But a lot of variables do not behave like the perfect standard distribution at all: due to non-linear effects and self-enforcing feedback loops, their distribution deviates more and more from the standard distribution the more extreme their values gets (they are "fat-tailed"). Referring to the n-sigma of such extreme events is plain and simple stupid, because there's no such thing as a standard deviation (or variance) for a fat-tailed distribution.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variance
Obviously, we don't have other pandemics' data to lean on. But we did have the economic crisis circa 2007 - 2008. There was plenty of analysis about the socio-economic impact of that event. That is, for example, poverty rate goes up, so does X, Y and Z.
If we can model a pandemic, can we not also - at least try - to mobel the impact of "the cure" and possible collateral damage?