> "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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
“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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
So last year more covid deaths (particularly among the elderly), but while those numbers have declined, the numbers from younger "working age" people have increased more than enough to make up for it.
> "Just 8.9% of ICU beds are available at hospitals in the state, a low for the year, and lower than at any time during the pandemic. But the majority of ICU beds are not taken up by COVID-19 patients – just 37% are, while 54% of the ICU beds are being occupied by people with other illnesses or conditions."
Well a lot of people were avoiding medical care (precisely because of Covid concerns), so this makes some sense. Couple that with the increased death rate for younger people and something has happened to worsen the health and outcomes generally for that population. Cue wild speculation and theories.
Working from home can remove a lot of the accountability that keeps addicts in check. When your coworkers can’t see you, it’s much easier to be inebriated or otherwise suffering from addiction-related issues without feeling social pressure to correct it.
Each these conditions doesn't just reduce lifespan. They also put people in a more fragile life-situation where they need more support. And the US hasn't been at maintaining those kinds of support during the epidemic.
Edit: The US life expectancy decline relative to other advanced nations is relevant. Take a look at the following chart in detail. US life expectancy was set back twenty years. No other nation was set by more than ten years.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-lif...
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.
Hell, in British Columbia there have been more drug overdoses than Covid deaths across all ages.
“ The synthetic and highly addictive drug has claimed more lives than COVID-19, auto crashes, gun violence, cancer and suicide in the year 2020.”
https://www.abc12.com/news/fentanyl-number-one-cause-of-deat...
Deleted Comment
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.
Let's assume deaths for older people haven't changed so the increase is entirely among the younger group.
x: younger y: older
1.4x + y = 1350 x + y = 1319 0.4x = 31 x = 77.5 (younger 2020) 1.4x = 108.5 (younger 2021) y = 1241.5 (older 2020 and 20201)
So assuming no increase in non-COVID deaths in the older group, we have 77.5 deaths in 2020 and 108.5 deaths in 2021 in the younger demographic. The actual numbers would be even lower since there have obviously been deaths in the older population.
Unless I am embarrassingly wrong on the calculation, these figures don't make sense. The source says this 40% increase figure is based on his life insurance customers who are “primarily working-age people 18 to 64”. This being just among his policy holders could explain the tiny absolute figures in the younger group. But where are the numbers for the older group coming from? His statement doesn't exclude the possibility of policies for ages < 18 and > 64. But if that's a small fraction of their customer base, it would imply a huge death rate for the older policy holders.
These numbers seem very fishy. Even if his older members are dying at astronomical rates and his numbers are correct, this is about as far from a representative sample as you could get and cannot be extrapolated to the general population. And I assume that's what the source means when he says "the increase in deaths represents huge, huge numbers."
By the way, I am not implying that there hasn't been an increase in non-COVID deaths among the young and old in these last two years. We know that's the because there is actually real data on this that the article could have included.
Something similar happened in my town when I saw a huge-looking spike in a graph of covid deaths. But when I looked closer, deaths had spiked from 0 to 3 on a particular day, and the average is 0.3/day. So that crazy looking spike is probably meaningless over a longer time window.
Changes in death rates directly relate to relative vaccination rates. Vaccination was initially rolled out to the elderly they where also more willing to get vaccinated. It’s strange to think that 75 year olds grew up in a time period where several horrific diseases disappeared due to vaccination efforts. It it’s clear they have a lot more faith in vaccination.
https://data.cdc.gov/Vaccinations/COVID-19-Vaccination-and-C...
There is uncertainty in many areas of life, but this seems like one thing we don’t have to speculate about. We will not only have definitive data [1] within a couple years, but also annual [2] and weekly [3] provisional data much sooner.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm
[3]: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Provisional-Counts-of-Death...
Without knowing anything else, I seriously doubt that is statistically significant.
The normal pre-COVID ICU bed occupancy rate was somewhere near 57-82% (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840149/). 54% is quite low. I suspect that the bar for getting into an ICU bed has been raised by the number of COVID patients.
BTW, Indiana has ~1,940 ICU beds (https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/indiana-releases-specific...). In numbers, that means
* ~173 are unoccupied,
* ~718 are occupied by COVID patients, and
* ~1048 are occupied by non-COVID patients.
It's literally the population, not a sample.
Not sure how your first two sentences above aren't speculation. It's like you're preemptively attack all the other speculation as "wild".
Dead Comment
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.
~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.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wvpublic.org/health-science...
[2] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm
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 am confused why you are completely ignoring this statement and trying to claim the exact opposite.
> July, 2020: 16,000 dead
> 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.
You could look these numbers up easily on the CDCs death data, and then you could formulate a coherent thought.
Instead, it seems like you're just trying to derail the conversation with as little effort as possible.
https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/why-didnt-suicides-rise...
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29706964
Where are you getting those numbers?
2019 - ages 25 - 44:
- represent ~320 deaths per 100k. [0]
- represent 85M pop. [1]
=> That's ~272k deaths per year in that age band.
You can check my math.
[0] (page 3) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db395-H.pdf
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the...
Further, this chart shows covid deaths as a proportion of all cause mortality. [2]
For ages under 50, covid accounts for 1-5% of all deaths.
For ages over 50, covid accounts for 10-15% of all deaths.
[2] (caveat, this is a snapshot of Feb 17 2021 data) https://datavisualizations.heritage.org/public-health/covid-...
In no age band do we see a 45% increase in deaths due to covid.
1. 600,000 more elderly Americans, or 1 of 100, have died during the Covid epidemic than would have died had the epidemic not occurred.
2. 200,000 more non-elderly Americans, or 1 of 1,400, have died—but that's mostly ages 15-64, so more like 1 in 1,000 adults of working age.
3. The CDC says adult death rates were up 20%. [2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/us/covid-deaths-elderly-a...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db427.htm#secti...
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.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2020/...
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."
1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
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).
There are quite a few studies showing that life years lost due to Covid are substantial even for the eldest.
This sounds very strange indeed, I'd like to see the numbers. For instance Euromomo https://www.euromomo.eu collects the statistics about death rates, here is a plot for the Italian death rate and you can see the mortality spikes with the covid waves, but those are quite specific for the elderly https://imgur.com/a/8cUdNcb
It sounds very strange that the death spike is "over" 3 sigma, which should mean over 3 standard deviations, which is really unbelievable, to me this looks like an artefact of some sort
Why does the fact that it is larger than 3 standard deviations suggest to you that it must be an artifact? If the death rate is normally very stable then the standard deviation will be small, so it will be easy for any unusual increase to exceed that.
Remember the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 that was a major catastrophe around the world? According to a Google search it killed 227,898 people. Last I checked Covid had killed about 5.5 million, which is worse that every single war since WWII.
Of course, I think it's very fair to say the devastation from a war is much worse than Covid (a war destroys infrastructure and primarily kills the young), but from a pure "number of deaths" perspective I think most people have a huge difficulty comprehending the severity of the pandemic.
Some 55 million people die each year. An extra 5 million is a big deal, yes, but there's almost 8 billion people on the planet. I think most people have a huge difficulty comprehending just how many humans there are on earth.
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's not an artifact, it's incorrect modeling. If they're talking about sigmas, then they're modeling deaths as being normally distributed. But deaths aren't normally distributed, as you can tell by glancing at a graph of deaths over time: there's way more probability mass in the extremes than you would expect from a normal distribution. This sort of thing (modelling something poorly, then getting all surprised when reality violates your model) is depressingly common.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat...
Death rates for an age range (like 18-45) are likely to be much more stable.
Also, pretty dubious about that specific dataset - it looks like it includes linear interpolations between a much smaller set of actual datapoints, so not sure you can use it to infer the actual distribution of death rate statistics
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.
[1] - https://www.nih.gov/how-covid-19-can-lead-diabetes
[2] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
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https://hdpulse.nimhd.nih.gov/data/deathrates/index.php?stat...
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.
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https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/life-expectancy-in-u-s-decl...
This is for 2020 - COVID-19 deaths are more for 2021.
Really wild numbers if you think about it.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
Have to look at the numbers to understand