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I've been meaning to ask in /r/theydidthemath if the quarantine is actually reducing violent crime, car accidents, pollution, other infectious diseases, STDs, e

I've been meaning to ask in /r/theydidthemath if the quarantine is actually reducing violent crime, car accidents, pollution, other infectious diseases, STDs, etc. so that we may come out break even or even ahead compared to covid deaths. Just trying to find the silver lining here.

mediumdeviation 7y ago
That seems unlikely given that in the week of April 6 to 12, Covid 19 has risen to the 2nd leading cause of death in the United States[1]. [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/16/coronavirus-leading-cause-death/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/16/coronaviru...
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  I’m also expecting some long term after-effects that will increase diabetes and heart disease as most people are locked up.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    non-essential procedures and doctor's visits have also been cancelled, and some medicines are now rationed also. Both will have a negative impact on the health of some people. I personally had a month long series of treatments scheduled that got cancelled, and now I have no idea when I'll be able to get that treatment. Better than dying from the virus, though.
    - Baeocystin 7y ago
      I've had a scan that was scheduled five months ago cancelled, and one of my vitally necessary meds was three weeks late getting filled. Good thing I'm worried about running out so had some to spare, but it's no joke that people are going to die due to simply not getting what they need.
      - Exmoor 7y ago
        My wife had a similar experience. Her issue is probably not major, but it could also be a serious cancer and who knows when they'll start taking clients again, much less catch up to her. Making a rough guess of two months of shutdown, we've lost 1/6 of our annual non-emergency medical capacity for 2020. It'd be impossible to put a number on the cost in lives that means, but I think we can probably say with certainty that there are a non-insignificant number of people who will die or experience permanent medical issues because diagnosis and/or treatment was delayed. Perhaps I've missed it, but I'm honestly shocked this isn't priority number one for a partial reopening in regions with low infection rates.
    - hf8665 7y ago
      A lot of these "elective" "nonessential" services are really preventative. This was plainly brought into view for me with a dental procedure I had to cancel/reschedule. It's deemed non-essential, but is necessary to prevent me from losing an entire tooth or two. If it's not done reasonably soon it's only a matter of time before it turns into an emergency dental procedure.
  - meritt 7y ago
    Really? Maybe my local experience is an outlier but I've seen significantly more people cooking meals at home and exercising. The number of daily runners in my neighborhood has easily increased 10x. Are gluttony and sedentary lifestyles not the major contributors for type-2 diabetes and heart disease?
    - lazyasciiart 7y ago
      Has the number of runners increased more than the number of people going to gyms/sports leagues/swimming pools has dropped?
      - bobthepanda 7y ago
        Also, are the people running new runners, or people who would otherwise be going to gyms?
    - dehrmann 7y ago
      I've had a similar experience, though I have no idea if the runners I'm seeing makes up for less activity throughout the day, gyms being closed, etc. It's possible that the 4% of people who go to the gym regularly are now running outside, and everyone else is even less active. Also, heart disease and type-2 diabetes are years in the making, and a month of moderate exercise and better eating won't make up for it overnight. Not to mention added stress.
      - arcticbull 7y ago
        Takes 21 days to form a new habit, so there's every chance they'll continue!
        watwut 7y ago
        No, there is not. When the circumstances change, habits change too. When people go back to work, they will have less time at their hands. They will have to adjust to commuting again, taking kids to/from school again, being somewhere at time again. All of that will cut into their exercise time. All the people who are exercising out of boredom now will stop exercising out of being tired of doing lot of things again.
- eanzenberg 7y ago
  This is bad analysis which uses historic numbers and plops COVID against them. Everyone right now is dying of COVID and not much else. Apparently it’s healing cancer and heart attacks. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm
  - natrik 7y ago
    I get the point you're trying to make with the data, but could you expand more on "healing cancer and heart attacks."? Not sure I follow
    - Izkata 7y ago
      If they're making the same claim I've seen elsewhere: People who would have died anyway from cancer/heart attacks but also have COVID19 are getting counted as COVID19 deaths instead of other causes, causing a dip in those numbers.
  - dennisgorelik 7y ago
    I understand why total number of deaths decreased a little bit due to quarantine. But sudden drop in total number of deaths from 52,992 down to 35,863 in the last week - looks suspicious.
zaroth 7y ago
Aside from even the fatalities, the math still is that 50% of LA is presently unemployed. While some articles are somehow gleeful in the face of this calamitous reality, there is no where near a net balance. The Fed has spent at least $2 trillion dollars on this already. Probably closer to $6 trillion by the time we are done. It is an unimaginably large cost to shut things down relative to any possible benefit.
- akiselev 7y ago
  > It is an unimaginably large cost to shut things down relative to any possible benefit. That's a failure of imagination.
- nostromo 7y ago
  Looking at the ~40k US deaths and the $6T spent, we’ve spent $150 million in stimulus per death. Looking at the non-spending costs of lost productivity, opportunity costs, etc., it’s a staggering number.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Surely the important number is per lives saved rather than per lives lost?
    - nostromo 7y ago
      Costs always matter. It’s rarely said in polite company but it’s true. I suppose it’s impossible to know if we’re striking the right balance at the moment, but it’ll be interesting to see the analysis after it’s over.
      - WD-42 7y ago
        I think you’re missing the point. It’s hard to tell when preventative actions work. It’s easy to tell when they fail. Right now the evidence is things would be a lot worse without them.
      - 7y ago
gizmo686 7y ago
Looking at the graph here [0], it would be very surprising if COVID was net saving lives. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/chart-us-weekly-coronavirus-deaths-compared-heart-disease-cancer-flu-2020-4#covid-19-is-now-killing-more-americans-weekly-than-heart-disease-or-cancer-did-on-average-per-week-in-2018-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/chart-us-weekly-coronavirus-...
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  Not looking good. :( I guess I thought a lot more people than that died from car crashes.
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    I wonder if we'll see a big drop in flu deaths as overwhelmingly only the old and sick die of COVID, and those folks are at large risk from the flu also.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > I wonder if we'll see a big drop in flu deaths The flu season overlapped with a period that included initial reports and fear of a novel respiratory disease and then historic, mandatory countermeasures (for the vast majority of the population) against communicable respiratory disease; it would be bizarre if there wasn't a big drop in flu deaths.
      - arcticbull 7y ago
        I meant in following years, as those who likely would have succumbed to the flu in following years succumb to COVID now. For the current period, there's absolutely no way flu, car and so on deaths don't plunge.
        dragonwriter 7y ago
        Even in vulnerable groups, the case fatality rate doesn't seem high enough that it would make a big impact in future statistics for that reason (probably bigger impact through lasting behavioral changes.)
robbiep 7y ago
some partial data: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/04/16/could-americas-slump-in-crime-be-the-beginning-of-something https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/04/16/could-ame...
product50 7y ago
Look at the unemployment rate. What else validation do you need? You can't just ask people to stay locked in their homes and assume everything would be ok.
nsomaru 7y ago
Apparently the death rate (general) in South Africa has dropped as a result of lockdown
onetimemanytime 7y ago
>>so that we may come out break even or even ahead compared to covid deaths. Just trying to find the silver lining here. Everything you said above are really down in North Korea, and have been so for decades. I doubt they're doing OK
dehrmann 7y ago
> reducing violent crime There are fears it will increase domestic abuse.
- vvpan 7y ago
  It seems to be happening. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/world/coronavirus-domestic-violence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/world/coronavirus-domesti...
dehrmann 7y ago
I'm expecting knock-on mental health effects to be pretty bad.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  Should at least be cushioned a bit by the absence of traffic noise and pollution related stress. Would be nice to have the benefits of both: very little motorized traffic AND no viral threat. We have no control over the latter, but we most certainly have some control over the former.
  - briandear 7y ago
    Domestic violence and child abuse is up. And suicides are increasing. And millions have lost their jobs. Pretty sure unemployed people or those that had their businesses destroyed aren’t basking in the lower noise and pollution reductions.
hannob 7y ago
The more interesting question is: Will we come ahead in lives saved without the covid measurements. Because it tells a very interesting story how many lives we're willing to accept to be lost in normal circumstances. Cars, air pollution, avoidable infections, ... - there's a lot of harm society could avoid and doesn't.
- afthonos 7y ago
  Those are unfortunately baked into our accounting, much like “killed by bandits” was accounted for in medieval trade until states started being able and willing to provide meaningful security.
  - jfoster 7y ago
    But the assumptions in many of them were made a long time ago and don't necessarily apply anymore. In the case of air pollution for example, there probably exists a price that could be paid to significantly reduce it and improve the overall health of everyone.
    - afthonos 7y ago
      I don’t disagree. But we seem to be bad at re-evaluating old decisions (definitely in my case), and it doesn’t help when politics is basically a team sport in the US.
    - thawaway1837 7y ago
      The issue is that the price is paid by a set of people who are different from the people who benefit from this. And the people who benefit are the ones in power, whereas the ones who suffer are the ones without power. So the trade offs are largely not accepted because they are acceptable to society at large, but because the people who have the power to make the decisions are insulated from it. In the US wealth is a decent proxy for power, so this claim can actually easily be quantified. Simply draw maps correlating the wealth of a neighborhood with the adverse effect being discussed. Whether it’s air pollution levels, or it’s deaths due to car accidents, or mercury in water, or lead in walls, it will invariably be the case the problem correlated strongly with the wealth of the area.
snovv_crash 7y ago
In South Africa at least, violent crime has dropped by 75%.
qplex 7y ago
>Just trying to find the silver lining here. Oh, we could pretty much save the planet and live happily ever after if we could keep it like this. Only to find some rock barreling down on us some day, but ah... I digress.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  Ignore the skyrocketing rates of suicide, domestic violence, and child abuse.
  - eropple 7y ago
    Source?
    - mantas 7y ago
      Domestic violence was up 20% in my country in first weeks of quarantine. Police and social services were super worried it will get worse as quarantine takes longer. I can google you some local media articles if you want to double-check via google translate. It makes sense though. People spend more time together in close quarters. People lost jobs. Lots of stress all around. Perfect storm for beating that bastard you meet in the kitchen.
      - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
        Let’s be honest. Most of the people on this site work from home (no financial worry) and are unmarried or probably no kids. They wouldn’t have any idea about the real cost of this quarantine to the 22 million unemployed Americans (and growing) who’s families were hurting even before this forced, indefinite unemployment.
evandijk70 7y ago
At least in the Netherlands, definitely not: The first Figure in this article (Dutch) shows the number of deaths from any cause. https://nos.nl/artikel/2330786-oversterfte-door-corona-blijft-stabiel-blijkt-uit-cbs-cijfers.html https://nos.nl/artikel/2330786-oversterfte-door-corona-blijf... During the Corona outbreak, almost double the amount of people are dying compared to the same time last year.
- rags2riches 7y ago
  There must be some sort of "flushing the pipeline" effect involved, provided that the virus kills the vulnerable to some extent. So I wonder how that will affect the numbers in the near future.
  - lukevdp 7y ago
    My guess is it will slip to slightly below the norm after the pandemic has passed. There are still a lot of people dying that had many years of life ahead of them.
  - genofon 7y ago
    of course everyone has to die at a certain point, when does make a difference and COVID is making a HUGE difference as you can see by the spike in mortality rate
hyko 7y ago
Public Health England’s all-cause mortality surveillance suggests not, at least in that country: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/879714/Weekly_all_cause_mortality_surveillance_week_16_2020_report.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
Violent crime should increase. Most violent crime is domestic abuse. Now all of America's abusive parents are out of work, stuck at home with their kids who are also stuck at home. So I think the pandemic will lead to more violent crimes in the household, at least. Dunno how other parts or life will be affected.
Taniwha 7y ago
I think it depends on the country, here in New Zealand we locked down early, and hard - we've only had 12 deaths - but the reduction in the road toll in the same time is roughly 20-30 so yes we're technically ahead on the deal. Generally though, covid deaths go up exponentially while road tolls likely don't go down the same way, our trade off is probably only likely if you get in early. In other news we're likely taking the first step of getting out of out ~1 month lock down later this coming week - our idea of getting out has been described as "lockdown with KFC", roughly equivalent to California's
divbzero 7y ago
For NYC the answer is “no”. 4,500 ≈ average deaths per month in 2017 [1] 6,125 = confirmed COVID-19 deaths from 2020-04-01 through 2020-04-15 [2] [1]: https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2017/table32c.htm https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2017/t... [2]: https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data/blob/master/case-hosp-death.csv https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data/blob/master/ca... Note that 6,125 doesn’t include COVID-19 deaths or non COVID-19 deaths, and is for the first half of April only.
yread 7y ago
Some deaths will decrease, others will go up. Treatments for other diseases are now being put off https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms2009984?query=RP https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms2009984?query=RP Cancers are not getting diagnosed early almost 50% in recent weeks than usual. That means worse stages at diagnosis and worse prognosis https://www.iknl.nl/nieuws/2020/door-de-covid-19-crisis-zijn-er-nu-minder-kankerdi https://www.iknl.nl/nieuws/2020/door-de-covid-19-crisis-zijn...
scottlocklin 7y ago
CDC all deaths data is available. FWIIW; the overall death rate is inarguably going down last time I checked.
javierluraschi 7y ago
If we look at the per-capita deaths, many affected countries seem to be moving towards surpassing the leading cause of death in the US, heart desease. At that magnitude, seems unlikely we are saving net lives. See https://twitter.com/javierluraschi/status/1251605333937500160?s=21 https://twitter.com/javierluraschi/status/125160533393750016...

mediumdeviation 7y ago

That seems unlikely given that in the week of April 6 to 12, Covid 19 has risen to the 2nd leading cause of death in the United States[1]. [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/16/coronavirus-leading-cause-death/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/16/coronaviru...

Scoundreller 7y ago
I’m also expecting some long term after-effects that will increase diabetes and heart disease as most people are locked up.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  non-essential procedures and doctor's visits have also been cancelled, and some medicines are now rationed also. Both will have a negative impact on the health of some people. I personally had a month long series of treatments scheduled that got cancelled, and now I have no idea when I'll be able to get that treatment. Better than dying from the virus, though.
  - Baeocystin 7y ago
    I've had a scan that was scheduled five months ago cancelled, and one of my vitally necessary meds was three weeks late getting filled. Good thing I'm worried about running out so had some to spare, but it's no joke that people are going to die due to simply not getting what they need.
    - Exmoor 7y ago
      My wife had a similar experience. Her issue is probably not major, but it could also be a serious cancer and who knows when they'll start taking clients again, much less catch up to her. Making a rough guess of two months of shutdown, we've lost 1/6 of our annual non-emergency medical capacity for 2020. It'd be impossible to put a number on the cost in lives that means, but I think we can probably say with certainty that there are a non-insignificant number of people who will die or experience permanent medical issues because diagnosis and/or treatment was delayed. Perhaps I've missed it, but I'm honestly shocked this isn't priority number one for a partial reopening in regions with low infection rates.
  - hf8665 7y ago
    A lot of these "elective" "nonessential" services are really preventative. This was plainly brought into view for me with a dental procedure I had to cancel/reschedule. It's deemed non-essential, but is necessary to prevent me from losing an entire tooth or two. If it's not done reasonably soon it's only a matter of time before it turns into an emergency dental procedure.
- meritt 7y ago
  Really? Maybe my local experience is an outlier but I've seen significantly more people cooking meals at home and exercising. The number of daily runners in my neighborhood has easily increased 10x. Are gluttony and sedentary lifestyles not the major contributors for type-2 diabetes and heart disease?
  - lazyasciiart 7y ago
    Has the number of runners increased more than the number of people going to gyms/sports leagues/swimming pools has dropped?
    - bobthepanda 7y ago
      Also, are the people running new runners, or people who would otherwise be going to gyms?
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    I've had a similar experience, though I have no idea if the runners I'm seeing makes up for less activity throughout the day, gyms being closed, etc. It's possible that the 4% of people who go to the gym regularly are now running outside, and everyone else is even less active. Also, heart disease and type-2 diabetes are years in the making, and a month of moderate exercise and better eating won't make up for it overnight. Not to mention added stress.
    - arcticbull 7y ago
      Takes 21 days to form a new habit, so there's every chance they'll continue!
      - watwut 7y ago
        No, there is not. When the circumstances change, habits change too. When people go back to work, they will have less time at their hands. They will have to adjust to commuting again, taking kids to/from school again, being somewhere at time again. All of that will cut into their exercise time. All the people who are exercising out of boredom now will stop exercising out of being tired of doing lot of things again.
eanzenberg 7y ago
This is bad analysis which uses historic numbers and plops COVID against them. Everyone right now is dying of COVID and not much else. Apparently it’s healing cancer and heart attacks. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm
- natrik 7y ago
  I get the point you're trying to make with the data, but could you expand more on "healing cancer and heart attacks."? Not sure I follow
  - Izkata 7y ago
    If they're making the same claim I've seen elsewhere: People who would have died anyway from cancer/heart attacks but also have COVID19 are getting counted as COVID19 deaths instead of other causes, causing a dip in those numbers.
- dennisgorelik 7y ago
  I understand why total number of deaths decreased a little bit due to quarantine. But sudden drop in total number of deaths from 52,992 down to 35,863 in the last week - looks suspicious.

zaroth 7y ago

Aside from even the fatalities, the math still is that 50% of LA is presently unemployed. While some articles are somehow gleeful in the face of this calamitous reality, there is no where near a net balance. The Fed has spent at least $2 trillion dollars on this already. Probably closer to $6 trillion by the time we are done. It is an unimaginably large cost to shut things down relative to any possible benefit.

akiselev 7y ago
> It is an unimaginably large cost to shut things down relative to any possible benefit. That's a failure of imagination.
nostromo 7y ago
Looking at the ~40k US deaths and the $6T spent, we’ve spent $150 million in stimulus per death. Looking at the non-spending costs of lost productivity, opportunity costs, etc., it’s a staggering number.
- ben_w 7y ago
  Surely the important number is per lives saved rather than per lives lost?
  - nostromo 7y ago
    Costs always matter. It’s rarely said in polite company but it’s true. I suppose it’s impossible to know if we’re striking the right balance at the moment, but it’ll be interesting to see the analysis after it’s over.
    - WD-42 7y ago
      I think you’re missing the point. It’s hard to tell when preventative actions work. It’s easy to tell when they fail. Right now the evidence is things would be a lot worse without them.
    - 7y ago

gizmo686 7y ago

Looking at the graph here [0], it would be very surprising if COVID was net saving lives. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/chart-us-weekly-coronavirus-deaths-compared-heart-disease-cancer-flu-2020-4#covid-19-is-now-killing-more-americans-weekly-than-heart-disease-or-cancer-did-on-average-per-week-in-2018-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/chart-us-weekly-coronavirus-...

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Not looking good. :( I guess I thought a lot more people than that died from car crashes.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  I wonder if we'll see a big drop in flu deaths as overwhelmingly only the old and sick die of COVID, and those folks are at large risk from the flu also.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > I wonder if we'll see a big drop in flu deaths The flu season overlapped with a period that included initial reports and fear of a novel respiratory disease and then historic, mandatory countermeasures (for the vast majority of the population) against communicable respiratory disease; it would be bizarre if there wasn't a big drop in flu deaths.
    - arcticbull 7y ago
      I meant in following years, as those who likely would have succumbed to the flu in following years succumb to COVID now. For the current period, there's absolutely no way flu, car and so on deaths don't plunge.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        Even in vulnerable groups, the case fatality rate doesn't seem high enough that it would make a big impact in future statistics for that reason (probably bigger impact through lasting behavioral changes.)

robbiep 7y ago

some partial data: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/04/16/could-americas-slump-in-crime-be-the-beginning-of-something https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/04/16/could-ame...

product50 7y ago

Look at the unemployment rate. What else validation do you need? You can't just ask people to stay locked in their homes and assume everything would be ok.

nsomaru 7y ago

Apparently the death rate (general) in South Africa has dropped as a result of lockdown

onetimemanytime 7y ago

>>so that we may come out break even or even ahead compared to covid deaths. Just trying to find the silver lining here. Everything you said above are really down in North Korea, and have been so for decades. I doubt they're doing OK

dehrmann 7y ago

> reducing violent crime There are fears it will increase domestic abuse.

vvpan 7y ago
It seems to be happening. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/world/coronavirus-domestic-violence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/world/coronavirus-domesti...

dehrmann 7y ago

I'm expecting knock-on mental health effects to be pretty bad.

PeterStuer 7y ago
Should at least be cushioned a bit by the absence of traffic noise and pollution related stress. Would be nice to have the benefits of both: very little motorized traffic AND no viral threat. We have no control over the latter, but we most certainly have some control over the former.
- briandear 7y ago
  Domestic violence and child abuse is up. And suicides are increasing. And millions have lost their jobs. Pretty sure unemployed people or those that had their businesses destroyed aren’t basking in the lower noise and pollution reductions.

hannob 7y ago

The more interesting question is: Will we come ahead in lives saved without the covid measurements. Because it tells a very interesting story how many lives we're willing to accept to be lost in normal circumstances. Cars, air pollution, avoidable infections, ... - there's a lot of harm society could avoid and doesn't.

afthonos 7y ago
Those are unfortunately baked into our accounting, much like “killed by bandits” was accounted for in medieval trade until states started being able and willing to provide meaningful security.
- jfoster 7y ago
  But the assumptions in many of them were made a long time ago and don't necessarily apply anymore. In the case of air pollution for example, there probably exists a price that could be paid to significantly reduce it and improve the overall health of everyone.
  - afthonos 7y ago
    I don’t disagree. But we seem to be bad at re-evaluating old decisions (definitely in my case), and it doesn’t help when politics is basically a team sport in the US.
  - thawaway1837 7y ago
    The issue is that the price is paid by a set of people who are different from the people who benefit from this. And the people who benefit are the ones in power, whereas the ones who suffer are the ones without power. So the trade offs are largely not accepted because they are acceptable to society at large, but because the people who have the power to make the decisions are insulated from it. In the US wealth is a decent proxy for power, so this claim can actually easily be quantified. Simply draw maps correlating the wealth of a neighborhood with the adverse effect being discussed. Whether it’s air pollution levels, or it’s deaths due to car accidents, or mercury in water, or lead in walls, it will invariably be the case the problem correlated strongly with the wealth of the area.

snovv_crash 7y ago

In South Africa at least, violent crime has dropped by 75%.

qplex 7y ago

>Just trying to find the silver lining here. Oh, we could pretty much save the planet and live happily ever after if we could keep it like this. Only to find some rock barreling down on us some day, but ah... I digress.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
Ignore the skyrocketing rates of suicide, domestic violence, and child abuse.
- eropple 7y ago
  Source?
  - mantas 7y ago
    Domestic violence was up 20% in my country in first weeks of quarantine. Police and social services were super worried it will get worse as quarantine takes longer. I can google you some local media articles if you want to double-check via google translate. It makes sense though. People spend more time together in close quarters. People lost jobs. Lots of stress all around. Perfect storm for beating that bastard you meet in the kitchen.
    - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
      Let’s be honest. Most of the people on this site work from home (no financial worry) and are unmarried or probably no kids. They wouldn’t have any idea about the real cost of this quarantine to the 22 million unemployed Americans (and growing) who’s families were hurting even before this forced, indefinite unemployment.

evandijk70 7y ago

At least in the Netherlands, definitely not: The first Figure in this article (Dutch) shows the number of deaths from any cause. https://nos.nl/artikel/2330786-oversterfte-door-corona-blijft-stabiel-blijkt-uit-cbs-cijfers.html https://nos.nl/artikel/2330786-oversterfte-door-corona-blijf... During the Corona outbreak, almost double the amount of people are dying compared to the same time last year.

rags2riches 7y ago
There must be some sort of "flushing the pipeline" effect involved, provided that the virus kills the vulnerable to some extent. So I wonder how that will affect the numbers in the near future.
- lukevdp 7y ago
  My guess is it will slip to slightly below the norm after the pandemic has passed. There are still a lot of people dying that had many years of life ahead of them.
- genofon 7y ago
  of course everyone has to die at a certain point, when does make a difference and COVID is making a HUGE difference as you can see by the spike in mortality rate

hyko 7y ago

Public Health England’s all-cause mortality surveillance suggests not, at least in that country: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/879714/Weekly_all_cause_mortality_surveillance_week_16_2020_report.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago

Violent crime should increase. Most violent crime is domestic abuse. Now all of America's abusive parents are out of work, stuck at home with their kids who are also stuck at home. So I think the pandemic will lead to more violent crimes in the household, at least. Dunno how other parts or life will be affected.

Taniwha 7y ago

I think it depends on the country, here in New Zealand we locked down early, and hard - we've only had 12 deaths - but the reduction in the road toll in the same time is roughly 20-30 so yes we're technically ahead on the deal. Generally though, covid deaths go up exponentially while road tolls likely don't go down the same way, our trade off is probably only likely if you get in early. In other news we're likely taking the first step of getting out of out ~1 month lock down later this coming week - our idea of getting out has been described as "lockdown with KFC", roughly equivalent to California's

divbzero 7y ago

For NYC the answer is “no”. 4,500 ≈ average deaths per month in 2017 [1] 6,125 = confirmed COVID-19 deaths from 2020-04-01 through 2020-04-15 [2] [1]: https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2017/table32c.htm https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2017/t... [2]: https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data/blob/master/case-hosp-death.csv https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data/blob/master/ca... Note that 6,125 doesn’t include COVID-19 deaths or non COVID-19 deaths, and is for the first half of April only.

yread 7y ago

Some deaths will decrease, others will go up. Treatments for other diseases are now being put off https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms2009984?query=RP https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms2009984?query=RP Cancers are not getting diagnosed early almost 50% in recent weeks than usual. That means worse stages at diagnosis and worse prognosis https://www.iknl.nl/nieuws/2020/door-de-covid-19-crisis-zijn-er-nu-minder-kankerdi https://www.iknl.nl/nieuws/2020/door-de-covid-19-crisis-zijn...

scottlocklin 7y ago

CDC all deaths data is available. FWIIW; the overall death rate is inarguably going down last time I checked.

javierluraschi 7y ago

If we look at the per-capita deaths, many affected countries seem to be moving towards surpassing the leading cause of death in the US, heart desease. At that magnitude, seems unlikely we are saving net lives. See https://twitter.com/javierluraschi/status/1251605333937500160?s=21 https://twitter.com/javierluraschi/status/125160533393750016...