> "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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>"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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
>“ 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Many people kept insisting "Not many young people are dying from Covid-19" a statement that over looked the fact that, under normal circumstances, not many young people die at all. But there was an article in the New York Times that offered these facts about people aged 20 to 40.
July, 2019: 11,000 dead
July, 2020: 16,000 dead
Both numbers are small in a country where 3 million people die each year, about 250,000 a month. But it's still a 45% increase, so that age group was the worst affected, in terms of the increase in death. The increase in the death rate of old people was not as dramatic, as older people make up the vast majority of all deaths, every year.
If you look at expected years of life lost - and the average person is ~30 - you could multiply the numbers by ~47.
~47 x 5,000 = 235k years of life (extra).
In the US in 2020 the average age of death from Covid was ~77 [1]. People ~77 are expected to life ~10.2 years [2]. In 2020, there were ~350k Covid deaths [3]. But (very crudely) 3.5M years of life lost.
This small group of 11,000 people (3%) made up 7% of years of life lost.
By 2021, the average age of Covid death was ~67 - so the average person was losing ~17 years of life [1]. This is because that extra ~5,000 deaths has so much weight.
This calculation is wrong. While the average 77 years old person will live 10.2 years, it’s not founded and unlikely the people dying from Covid at that age are distributed uniformly.
Most likely a 77 yo dying of Covid is in worse health and have more co morbidities than the average 77 yo.
This calculation is interesting and a good way to look at things, but it requires more nuance that is likely to reduce those numbers.
I'm not sure that calculation makes sense. If someone has already lived to 77 he probably has a much higher chance of living to 78 than the average person. And if someone has lived past 78 does that mean he's lost negative years of life?
Excess deaths by 45% would seem to indicate that the cause of death is simply incorrect. (Or it’s one of myriad tangentially related deaths: procedures not done, doctors not seen, hospital beds not available, on top of COVID related stressors exacerbating drug use and mental health problems.)
> But it's still a 45% increase, so that age group was the worst affected, in terms of the increase in death.
You can't draw that conclusion at all with, effectively, one data point while assuming the other is a baseline. You need to develop a proper statistical profile, determine the mean, variance/standard deviation, standard error and then try to understand the numbers to make inferences.
No, it’s not what-about-ism. It’s a suggestion that the two numbers being thrown around are accompanied by some bare minimum of detail to have a meaningful conversation.
OP made the link to Covid-19, which seems very plausible, but it’s not clear if they have facts to support this or it’s just a guess. Suicides and overdoses are two of the leading causes of death among young Americans. It’s irresponsible to discuss a 40% increase in deaths and imply this is all Covid-19 without any evidence.
The random hypothesis was made by OP, who inferred that the 45% increase in deaths is due to Covid-19.
I would guess a lot of that 45% is due to Covid, but how much would be a guess, and I suspect OP is just guessing too.
Overdoses are historically one of the leading causes of death among people in this age range, and we’re also setting records for overdose deaths this year [0], but that gets no almost coverage compared to Covid. I think it’s reasonable to keep in mind that overdoses could also be contributing to that 45% uptick, unless we have evidence to the contrary.
A really useful exercise you can do for yourself (I did it) is to download the CDC total US deaths data and plot each of the past 7 years as lines on an x axis that goes from week 1 to week 52 of the year. Keeping in mind that this graph does not take cause of death into account, you will note two striking features: 1) the death curves for the 5 years up to and including 2019 are extremely similar, with the exception that you can tell they are overall slightly elevated one winter by a particularly bad flu season (I think it was end of 2017 / beginning of 2018). And 2) 2020 and 2021 have very large Covid-surge-shaped excess death bumps that imply an incredibly strong correlation between Covid and the deviation in deaths from “normal” years. And if you find the delta between a “normal” year and the ones with the Covid-shaped bumps in it, it matches up extremely closely with the numbers CDC is also reporting as “Covid-related deaths.”
In order to say that a significant number of these are drug and suicide deaths, you’d also have to be positing a theory that drug and suicide deaths are also for some reason elevating themselves in precise timing with the Covid surges. I’m not going to claim this is impossible, but it does seem extremely far fetched to me, and I suspect seeing the data laid out like I describe would probably make you abandon your theory. (Edit: using ‘your theory’ colloquially here. I know you havent posited any specific theory here, but your line of reasoning and skepticism is clear)
Edit to add: I actually don’t doubt that excess drug and suicide deaths are partially responsible for general elevated death numbers. Lockdowns, isolation, job losses, etc are all certainly driving some of this. But these are slow and steady drivers, not ones that rise and fall precisely with the number of Covid cases, which takes me to the conclusion that they are in the noise compared to Covid itself. (And the CDC death categorizations happen to agree with that)
There’s definitely a significant rise in excess deaths among 25-44 year olds coinciding with the Delta peak in August/September.
Something interesting though: In the Covid “valley” of June/July, when Covid-related deaths were at a record low nationally, 25-44 year olds still had a ~35% increase in excess deaths. I’d expect a drop in excess deaths close to prepandemic levels if they were being driven mainly by (short-term) Covid effects during that time. It seems like the baseline death rate increased independently of number of active Covid cases.
I don’t have time at the moment to do the math, but I’d suspect most of the increase we’ve seen in the past year is due to Covid, but with the increase in overdoses and other causes contributing much than noise since 2019. This could explain the higher death rate that persisted throughout the summer.
Perhaps. But this means that when Covid deaths dropped to ~1,700/week nationally over the summer and 25-44 year olds still had ~800 excess deaths/week, almost half the people dying of Covid-19 in the US were young and nobody was talking about it. Seems unlikely.
Excess deaths includes deaths that were directly attributable due to other causes, but may still be indirectly caused by COVID. Suppose I were to break into a dialysis clinic and abscond with half the equipment. If this is an isolated incident, then patients can be sent to other clinics, or dialysis machines brought in. But suppose I were to break into every dialysis clinic and steal half the equipment. In that case, there's no surplus that can be shuffled around, and people would die. The direct cause of death would still be kidney failure, but I would have been the indirect cause.
In the same way, COVID puts pressure on the hospital system as a whole. Nurses who could have been monitoring a post-surgery recovery are instead monitoring ventilators in the COVID wing, or are quarantined after being exposed. The crash cart arrives a little bit slower to a heart attack, because the closest one was already in use. If the available nurses are on longer shifts, that contributes to sleep deprivation, making it easy to miss details that would otherwise have been caught.
This is true across all age groups. As of September, while COVID had 4.6 million direct fatalities, there had been 15 million excess deaths. Determining the final scope of COVID will be a matter of long research, and certainly isn't something that can be resolved in a short internet argument. Dismissing it as "Seems unlikely." when not even comparing between the same same type of measurement seems premature.
>And 2) 2020 and 2021 have very large Covid-surge-shaped excess death bumps that imply an incredibly strong correlation between Covid and the deviation in deaths from “normal” years.
It would be more accurate to say "COVID-19 impacted years" than "incredibly strong correlation between Covid".
A lot of government and public policy changes were quickly made during these times. Are you willing to say with complete certainty that the lockdowns and associated increase in poor mental health had no impact?
We also had global supply chain crunches which affected food and medication availability (among other things). Are you willing to say that having certain brands of prevention / life saving drugs completely unavailable (forcing people to consult doctors for substitutes or go without) had no impact?
I think you’ll see that I very explicitly said I am not willing to definitively say those things, but that I am highly skeptical that those types of effects would be so responsive to the changes in number of
Covid cases.
Does it in any way make sense to you that Covid cases falling by X% in a given week would directly cause an immediate corresponding drop in depression, drug overdose, or prescription drug supply chain issues? That would be absolutely incredible to me. It did however cause an immediate corresponding decline in excess deaths, regardless of assigning any cause. That tells me something.
> It did however cause an immediate corresponding decline in excess deaths, regardless of assigning any cause.
Did it, though? We see deaths increase in August/September during the Delta wave, but we don’t see them decline when Covid cases fell drastically earlier in the summer: https://imgur.com/a/b4Pobrh
That suggests 25-44 year olds may be experiencing an elevated death rate that persists even when Covid cases were low.
I’ll need to rerun my graphs. I haven’t done them since mid summer but at the time if you overlaid the Covid rise and fall on the excess deaths rise and fall it was uncanny how well they matched. The falling side of delta may have been different.
For anyone who wants to see this data without running the numbers themselves, the CDC has a dashboard showing total weekly deaths per week over the last several years, the trend line, and the obvious significant increases over the last couple years. They update it weekly, but it takes a couple weeks for the data to become accurate (the recent weeks have always been an undercount while reporting catches up).
For interpretation, the orange line is average expected deaths for that week, and you'd expect weekly deaths to cluster around that. Red is the "upper bound threshold", ie deaths over this are way out of the norm.
You can also switch the dashboard to "Excess deaths with and without COVID-19", which shows the same bar chart but with reported covid deaths stacked on top of non-covid reported deaths. It makes it clear that (1) excess deaths line up very well with reported deaths and (2) the US has done an overall good job of reporting covid deaths, outside of some probable undercounting at the very start.
What exactly am I derailing? An unsubstantiated claim made by OP that contradicts details provided in the parent article?
“Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths … 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 … the moving average of daily deaths from COVID-19 is less than half of what it was a year ago”
“Lazy” is not reading the article. And if “derailing” an unfounded assumption to better understand these deaths is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
However, injuries are far more likely to be life threatening if health care resources are scarce, as they have become in Indiana.
This is precisely the challenge presented by a pandemic. That's precisely why the lethality of the pandemic virus is largely irrelevant. The threat from a pandemic is the overwhelming of health care resources.
So it's kind of splitting hairs to worry about whether the cause of death is COVID-19 or not. Either way, it's the pandemic. There's a literally historic shift in the death rate among the young that correlates very well with the the availability of care... and we have the people working in the hospitals saying that this is the underlying problem.
Maybe young people have had a 40% increase in deaths from injury, from suicides, from overdoses, or from tipping over vending machines. The specific COD isn't the problem.
My little brother died this year. He was electrocuted and his heart stopped immediately. You can keep someones brain alive with cpr for around thirty minutes but they didn't have any available first responders (they have defibs) because of covid calls. They showed up an hour later.
The biggest portion of this growth is almost certainly being driven by opioid poisoning. This was growing quickly pre-pandemic, but has skyrocketed in the last two years.
I looked up the information in a previous thread. For the United States, using the most conservative Covid numbers, they outweighs these by at least a factor of 5.
Overdose and suicide are two of the leading causes of death among young people. If Covid deaths were 5X higher, we’d see a much much larger overall increase than 40%.
Edit: Your numbers are for the total population, not young people. The death rates and leading causes of death are drastically different between young people and the general population.
OP says deaths among people 20-40 are up 45%, and inferred that this is due to Covid. That’s the hypothesis being made here. And it contradicts what’s in the parent article, namely that many of these deaths are from causes other than Covid:
“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.”
I’m suggesting that other leading causes of death among people in this age range could possibly be up this year, and contributing to this uptick, perhaps by a significant amount.
For example, in SF, the number of people in this age range dying of overdoses far outnumbers the people in this age range dying of Covid. Nationally, we are setting record numbers of overdoses, driven mostly by fentanyl.
”In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in November that more than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, May 2020 to April 2021, with about three-quarters of those deaths involving opioids — a national record.” [0]
The article is talking about deaths by Nov 2020 compared to Nov 2021 when there was an accessible effective vaccine. Parent comment is talking about increase of deaths from 2019 to 2020. I don't see the applicability of that quote. (Maybe OP and you and me are all off topic, but here we are.)
[0] has no statistics on opioid deaths.
[1] says that the deaths were going to be higher in Vermont, at (a projected) 200 deaths for the year vs 157 for the previous. That's maybe meaningful, but isn't limited to the age group the post parent was discussing.
[2] Does not have year over year statistics to compare against. Just that it was the worst, and is drawing on a smaller sample size than [1].
If (and this kind of seems like a big if) Vermont is representative of the rest of the US, *and* the age group he was discussing then maybe you have one source that supports your claim that a large portion of the deaths are from additional opioid deaths.
On the other hand assuming the root of the increase of all cause mortality between 2019 and 2020 among adults is mostly uncorrelated with the pandemic is a tough thing to convince me of. Can you please provide a source showing the national increase of opioid overdoses and suicide between 2019 and 2020 among the 20-40 age group?
Note I agree entirely that there were more overdose deaths in the US in 2020 than 2019 (that's easy to source https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...) what is hard is breaking it down into these smaller nuggets that we're discussing.
ETA: I couldn't find the original NY Times article grand-grand-grand... parent talked about that got us down this path, but this is pretty convincing that all cause mortality increased by at least 45% https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7376843/
How many drug overdoses and suicides are directly related to covid and its impact on society, and by extension our failure to stop it before it became unstoppable?
Worth noting that while there is a clear and measurable increase, the CDC makes a nonetheless significant error by assuming 2019 is the baseline when in fact we see a baseline increase every year even without other factors (both because of increasing population and because of slowing advances in medically extending lifespans).
Population growth is about 0.4% in the US, so that's probably not a big factor. In 2019, the CDC estimated that age-adjusted expected lifespan increased by 1.2% [0].
I think the population growth would indicate a lower death rate than implied by direct counting, since total pop is the denominator. However, I think the increased lifespan would work in the counter direction - Americans should live longer in 2020 than in '19 without C19.
So while the CDC made methodological mistakes, I don't think it would affect the conclusion.
2. might be wrong since the age group is manipulative but you haven't corrected enough. This data is a bit harder to get though and may not be available to the US. But data from other countries suggest that a vast majority of cases is in the 60-64 bracket. Sadly many governments choose these questionable grouping and it is fairly misleading.
> 600,000 more elderly Americans, or 1 of 100, have died during the Covid epidemic than would have died had the epidemic not occurred.
The article does not say this. The substantial majority of Covid deaths occur among people close to or beyond the typical life expectancy [1]. It's hard to measure how many people would have died during this time frame due to complications other than Covid, and the NYT article you linked to did not claim that these are additional deaths beyond what "would have died had the epidemic not occurred."
The "typical life expectancy" is not a terribly useful number (unless you are considering emigration). A much more useful measure is the life expectancy at a person's current age (which will always be greater than their current age).
And I note it is quite easy to figure out how many people you would expect to die from complications other than Covid---as a first order approximation it will be the same as in 2019 (unless you happen to know of a significant change other than COVID).
> And I note it is quite easy to figure out how many people you would expect to die from complications other than Covid---as a first order approximation it will be the same as in 2019 (unless you happen to know of a significant change other than COVID).
Correct, you could record the number of deaths due to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. and subtract depressions in these death categories from Covid deaths. Subtract away reductions in non-covid deaths from the Covid death toll to account for the people that would have died absent Covid.
My point is the linked NYT article didn't do this correction and it's wrong to write that they did.
True, but it's drastically more likely that someone over 65 would have died over the course of the pandemic (which is approaching several years at this point) than someone between 18-65. Years lost from elderly deaths may be "substantial" but it's an act of wilful ignorance to pretend that it isn't a lot smaller than years of life lost from a 20 year old dying.
But also, the subset of people who died from Covid is almost certainly not akin to a random sample from the broader population of the age cohort (and therefore not a subset which you could apply those life expectancy averages to).
“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
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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».
> 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.
My hypothesis is that this is caused from diabetes. I first learned about this when my friend was diagnosed with diabetes at the beginning of the pandemic. He said that Stanford was investigating a potential connection. Now there is a bit more literature [1]. If you go to [2] and select "Weekly Number of Deaths by Cause Subgroup" and then "Other select causes" from the dropdown, you will see that diabetes jumped up at the start of the pandemic and has stayed at ~40% increased levels since.
The effects of covid on the pancreas are interesting to me. I started having what appear to be pancreatic issues in May. I'm wondering if it may have been triggered by an otherwise asymptomatic covid infection but I'm not sure how to confirm.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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).
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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, ...).
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.
Mortality rates are basically up in all countries (at least those who can adequately measure it). My bet is that "after Covid" we will see rates under the pre-pandemic value for a couple of years as Covid was most lethal to those that would have died the next 0-5 years anyways without it.
Yes excess mortality it will probably go down in the older groups that died slightly pre-maturely. But the deaths in the 18-64 is not just from Covid-19 but from things exacerbated by it on the society level; Delaying treatment/tests, Drug Overdose, Alcoholism, Depression, Suicide, Traffic Accidents etc. Those are net-new and not necessarily ones that would have happened in the next 5 years.
Don't forget to add in the folks who technically recovered from COVID but are suffering lingering conditions like scarred lung tissue, kidney damage, atrial fibrillation, myocarditis, [...]. Those will add more sad stories over the coming years as those conditions will make recovering from other ailments harder.
I run the same trail for over 10 years. In the last year, I had to call 911 for a guy with chest pains and twice for suicidal women waiting on the train tracks for the train. Never happened before.
I'm a little scared we may be entering a period of mass psychosis which is more deadly than any virus.
The psychological conditions that lead people to burn witches and the rise of dictatorships are here.
If I was richer I would probably be buying a home on some tiny island in the Caribbean.
With few exceptions, if you want to know what's really going on, the insurance companies are the numbers to draw from. They have a vested interest in knowing what's happening and people usually have a vested interest in reporting to them to collect resources.
(The exception is when there are secondary effects. Auto insurance reporting under samples minor accidents, because people don't want to risk their perfect driving record rate bonuses on a fender-bender. But there are no incentives to refrain from collecting on life insurance.)
Note that life insurance isn't going to be a good model--there are two selection biases at work here.
1) Those in ill health likely can't afford life insurance.
2) Life insurance is mostly to provide for dependents--which means people in good enough shape to have dependents and people are young enough to still have dependents. (Once the kids are grown there's much less reason for term life insurance.)
Good point. You've highlighted two ways in which these numbers might under count COVID fatalities based on what we know about correlation with both age and prior health conditions and morbidity with this disease.
Lockdown/wfh related perhaps? I would definitely say I've become significantly more sedentary, likewise for many of my friends and coworkers, given we're all in tech.
Different countries have different methods of determining if COVID was the cause of death, but so far if I remember correctly only Belgium has excess mortality equivalent to attributed COVID deaths, thanks to their cause qualification method (if COVID is only suspected but wasn't diagnosed, it is attributed to COVID).
My uncle was outside that age group but died last summer of a heart attack —- due to Covid. All the ICU beds in his area were occupied by Covid patients.
I’m so sorry. My father-in-law has had his “elective” surgery to deal with a hernia cancelled twice due to hospital overcapacity, and all we can do is pray that Germany’s current restrictions will have kept the numbers low enough for his current appointment this week and likely follow up procedure to deal with tachycardia to happen.
They’re not even talking about rescheduling the hernia surgery anytime soon - he’s making do with a compression band.
This is why it is other people’s business whether someone is vaccinated.
I don’t disagree but I think we should also be demanding more capacity from our hospitals and maybe just maybe demanding actual universal healthcare. It’s so bizarre to me that that’s not even on the table but it’s because most just assume we have to have a for-profit medical system.
I agree but we should have started a recruitment campaign for more nurses etc. We’re not really doing anything it seems. We should be trying to do more. My relatives in the healthcare industry are all overworked and complain about staffing shortages. Seems like this is a bigger issue than just COVID. It’s out for-profit healthcare system…
Nearly universal: there is a universal legal requirement that you have health insurance, and about 90% of the population is a member of one of the very strictly regulated Krankenkasse (the "public" option), with most of the remaining 10% is covered by more loosely-regulated (but still strict by US standards) private insurance.
Nearly universal: there are, by many estimates, at least tens of thousands of people who fall through the cracks - mostly (former) small business owners, other independent contractors, and widows of government employees who cannot afford their private insurance anymore, and are too old/unemployed to require a Krankenkasse to take them in.
Doctors own their own practices, or are employed by practices or hospitals. They have the choice to not accept Krankenkasse repayment rates, in which case they can only accept private patients (privately insured, or self-paying).
Germany's health economy looks more like the US than it does the UK. Overall, it is less expensive for similar quality, and American-style ruinous 6-figure bills are unheard of.
Thanks for the explanation! With the exception of the implication that Krakenkasses aren’t required to be available to all (why? Strange that there would be age/employment requirements), that sounds excellent, at least from a US perspective. I think a public option that can negotiate and isn’t just a price taker goes a long way to reining in the excesses of the private options and the providers, if they want to remain competitive. We don’t really have that normalizing force in the US. But it’s nice to retain the private options so you have the option to pay more for better/quicker service.
Hospitals build out capacity based on projections of need. So they look at the population of their catchment area, other hospitals, demographics of the locals, and calculate that they’ll need about X icu beds / maternity rooms etc etc and then build in a small overcapacity for surges.
If they routinely overbuilt then cost would go up even more. I think this approach is reasonable for any business,* whether private or public hospital.
The Covid surge isn’t something you can plan for, nor could you really build ICU capacity quickly enough for.
Also there’s a systems issue: the ICU pressure shouldn’t even exist to the degree it does as we have a “defense in depth”: vaccination. But for some reason people aren’t using that defense, which simply makes things worse for the rest of us.
* not getting into the cost issues in general, just addressing your specific comment.
I generally agree but just to clarify I didn’t say overbuild—just more than our current capacity which seems to be admittedly inadequate for the current crisis. We have no flexibility.
Look at how many fewer deaths there are in countries with universal healthcare. Maybe when we don’t have to pay useless middlemen like insurers then we can spend the money to hire more healthcare workers. I think it’s just our for-profit healthcare is always going to provide the bare minimum for the highest cost—-and is woefully unprepared for this pandemic.
>I think this approach is reasonable for any business
It's reasonable for business, but not reasonable for society (because healthcare should be more risk adverse than a business). That's why the hospital system for op of this thread, which is German, isn't a business, and why they get to complain about how it's deployed
I have benefitted from the German health care system myself and I stand by my statement.
Governments are not immune against financial considerations any more than the private sector is. For example the transportation ministry/department has a figure at which a life is valued and won’t build a road improvement if the cost/mile exceeds that.
The article says no such thing, and in fact doesn’t even address that issue.
The closest is the following: “It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.”
The person quoted isn’t commenting on hospitals at all. For example my uncle doesn’t have COVID on his death certificate but his doctor says that his case was simple enough that he could have been saved had he been able to be admitted.
True, but that statement doesn’t make the implication you claim; the other arm of the statement would have to be an assertion that the hospitalization rate would (or would not) have been higher had no vaccination been performed.
“Fortunately” (well for this argument anyway) there are natural experiments going on (including between US states, between counties in large states like California, and between European countries) that appear to demonstrate that vaccination does in fact reduce hospitalization
But reducing hospitalzitation alone isn't fair enough metric. What about people being disabled/dying from cardiovascular diseases as a consequence of mRNA therapy? They aren't taken into account by pharma and politicians. They are even going further against the common sense by blaming global warming!?
This is a massive story and hugely under-reported.
Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths, Davison said.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Excess mortality seems to be way higher in the US than it is in the Europe, even though reported Covid deaths are in the same ballpark. In Europe, Covid deaths and excess mortality seem to match, more or less. In the US, excess mortality is several times higher.
Pretty likely this is associated with the huge increase in mental illness associated with isolation during the pandemic. The depression rate tripled from pre-pandemic levels, leading to a 20% increase in suicide rates. Obviously drug use and all the associated risks would increase due to that, but there are also a few studies showing a strong correlation between mental health and life expectancy, even after accounting for drug use.
I really appreciate the forwardness of the CEO w/ data, but this one seems interesting:
> 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
Clearly the model doesn't account any massive problems to your customer base. 1-in-200yr is only the age of the country. Pandemics happen "relatively regularly" on those time scales[0].
Interesting balances though. $100mm losses w/ the current models vs the pandemic.
Clearly life insurances will get quite expensive for a while.
Very disappointed that the other thread regarding this from today got merged into this one as a "dupe". I actually lost track of it and it feels like discussion about it is being "squashed". I went to HN on my desktop to discuss it and couldn't find it on the front-page anymore. Even though that may not be the intention.
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?
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.
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.
Well, I'm sure there is a little bit of significance, but you have to take into account that it's a relatively small number of deaths compared to the population size, and the person giving you the news about "DEATHs ARE UP" sells LIFE INSURANCE.
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.
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.
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.
It's called a long-term study. B is the placebo group. The Pfizer vaccine was rolled out after a two-month study instead of the usual 5-10 years. Slide 12 of this document [1] shows an increase in death following the Pfizer inoculation. The Pfizer vaccine is causing acute myocarditis
in people under the age of 50. This is causing people to collapse months later when the heart is put under strain with seemingly no symptoms. But don't listen to me, I'm just a crazy conspiracy theorist. In fact, go ahead and trust science and get yourself a booster shot.
It would be a thousand A/B tests, because there was no one "covid measure". Individual measures like wearing n95s in crowded areas like stores make sense, but not allowing music at gyms is stupid. My childrens' school is still on full lockdown. They are wearing masks outside and must keep distance from each other. And all students are fully vaccinated. Makes no sense.
The information itself is neutral. The channel is not. Unfortunately, this information isn't digested by the sort of critical and investigative journalism that should exist in our society. The obviously wrong or misleading information gets "fact checked", but this just gets ignored. There's no room for nuance when the prevailing belief is that "everyone must get vaccinated or people will die".
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
If they are comparing deaths in 2020 when everyone except "essential workers" was stuck at home for 3/4 of the year, to 2021 when many more people were back to their routine of driving, work, recreation, etc. I would not be surprised to see a spike in deaths for young people who are back into doing a lot more things that can cause accidents.
If they are comparing 2021 to something like a 10 year average death rate and seeing a 40% jump, then that is more interesting.
Also raw numbers matter. Two deaths from some rare cause this year vs. one last year is a 100% increase, but doesn't really mean anything in a state with 6.5 million people.
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?
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
> 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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well a few months back in official UK mortality statistics from the ONS you could see a massive increase in the non-covid death rate for vaccinated people, but no one in the health authorities seemed to notice or feel the need to explain it.
They also found a U.S. national average vaccine-induced fatality rates or VFR of 0.04% and higher VFR with age. For those aged 0 to 17, they had a VFR of 0.004%, while those aged 75 and above had a VFR of 0.06%. Data showed that there were over 146,000 to 187,000 vaccine-related deaths in the U.S. alone between February to August 2021. The researchers wrote, "Notably, adult vaccination increased ulterior mortality of unvaccinated young."
A much simpler explanation is that this is a side effect of the pandemic itself.
The timing of the vaccine roll out is of course related to the timing of the pandemic. So it's expected that we would see some loose correlation in timing between the different events related to the pandemic.
Things such as increase in mental issues and increased drug consumption due to loneliness, lack of medical care due to overflowed hospitals or loss of income etc. all took time to build up once the pandemic started.
Just as it took time to manufacture and distribute a vaccine once the pandemic started.
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.
You could check for excess mortality among vaccinated and unvaccinated people. I think the data is very clear: vaccination does not lead to excess mortality (unlike COVID).
I think that would be very tricky to decouple variables here. The vaccine seems to reduce mortality from COVID, but if the vaccine were killing x% itself, the vaccine would only have to be more effective at saving from COVID than killing for that safety signal to be lost. In short, comparing vaxxed vs unvaxxed mortality alone isn't likely to tell you if you have a vaccine safety signal.
You're right, you'd have to test whether people in each group are infected with COVID, and correct for that. Should still be doable. Would also need to correct for age and co-morbidities (doable), and also for differences in behaviour (hard).
A study of covering seven sites in the US from December 14, 2020 from July 31, 2021 found lower non-COVID mortality among vaccination individuals:
> During December 2020–July 2021, COVID-19 vaccine recipients had lower rates of non–COVID-19 mortality than did unvaccinated persons after adjusting for age, sex, race and ethnicity, and study site.
The original (official) data shows how likely is someone to die if vaccinated vs unvaccinated. "Rate" part of "Death rate" means the number of deaths is already divided by the population in one of the groups (vaccinated or not), so the size of a group doesn't affect the rate.
I'm convinced you could show data that every single person that received the vaccine died and these people would still say it's safe. Objectivity is gone and health care is now political. The sheer irony that Trump was blamed for everything except for the worst thing that he actually did. Operation Warp Speed rushed the scientific process and caused bad medicine to be released to the general public.
"451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact info@franklinnews.org or call (847) 497-5230."
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact info@franklinnews.org or call (847) 497-5230.
> 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 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.
> 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.
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
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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'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.
> 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?
Maybe it's similar to the well known "more likely to be hit by a meteorite than to win the lottery" style statements. Obviously that's completely wrong: i've never heard of anyone being hit by a meteorite, but people win the lottery every month.
I'm not saying that they're actively lying, but it seems some assumptions in these frequentist's numbers are just not correct.
They're not lying. It's just meteorite kills are very clumpy.
I'm not a lottery player so I can't give a good estimate on the number of lottery winners, but for the major jackpots I'll guess many per year.
AFIAK we have no documented meteorite deaths--but it looks like the destruction of Sodom (of biblical fame) was a meteorite. While obviously we have no death toll it's obviously a *lot* of years of major lottery wins. The atmosphere stops most of the stuff but when something's big enough to get through it makes quite a boom. (Chelyabinsk was half a megaton but was high enough up the blast only caused harm by throwing broken windows at people. Tunguska, however was a few megatons and got low enough to be a city-killer. All it blew up was forest for probably zero deaths, but had it fallen 7 hours earlier the world would be a different place because it would have wiped out Leningrad.)
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.
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.
People tend not to die in that age range from natural causes. Even covid has a relatively low impact in that range. For instance, I’d expect higher deaths in 2020 from covid than this year, assuming the vaccines are effective and not causing the issues (perhaps they are...?)
I’m curious what factors are the major causes. I’m guessing mental health, obesity and drugs. Although anecdotal, I know multiple people who had a major downward spiral the past 12 months, particularly in mental health. Delaying treatment the last 18-24 months for basic checkups could also lead to some major issues.
>assuming the vaccines are effective and not causing the issues (perhaps they are...?)
The numbers on vaccine complications are almost certainly underreported, you could surmise this just by observing how they have made every effort to shut down any negative media about it to prevent "vaccine hesitancy".
Perhaps it's not the vaccines even, but mistakes during administration from undertrained or exhausted medical workers (i.e. malpractice). At any rate the media appears to be making no fuss about the increasing number of young people getting heart attacks.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
