5 ms·

I also share your concern about claims made by Gieseke. The article quotes Gieseke as saying "The real death toll, he suggested, will be in the region of a sev

I also share your concern about claims made by Gieseke. The article quotes Gieseke as saying "The real death toll, he suggested, will be in the region of a severe influenza season — maybe double that at most". Sweden's official death toll was 2270 yesterday (2020-04-28). The three worst influenza seasons in Sweden since 1969 killed 807, 674 and 652 people[1]. So we've already passed his "at most" claim. The only way I can see that working out is if he feels that none of the influenza seasons in the past 50 years count as "severe". [1]: numbers taken from the Swedish wikipedia entry on influenza. I didn't bother to check wikipedia's source. An average Swedish influenza season kills about 200.

alkonaut 6y ago
> he only way I can see that working out is if he feels that none of the influenza seasons in the past 50 years count as "severe". Or that he doesn't think deaths in past influenza seasons were all attributed to influenza but rather just "normal" deaths. The excess all-cause deaths will be the figure to look at, but it will take quite a while before those numbers are reliable.
- gizmo 6y ago
  But the excess death data will also be tainted because people, especially older people, avoid going to hospitals out of fear of catching covid19. Cancer screenings are way down, and fewer people go to the ER with heart attacks and the like. This will inevitably lead to excess mortality down the road --even among otherwise healthy people--, but it will be very hard to determine the magnitude of this second-order effect. Of course it's also very hard to distinguish between people dying with covid19 and dying because of it. And we've never even made a serious effort to track the cause of death of the elderly. Meaning we don't know how many people die each year from the flu, and we don't know how many people are dying of covid19. When you add it all up, it will be very difficult to learn the right lessons from this pandemic.
  - DanBC 6y ago
    That's not what excess mortality means. They don't say "this many extra people died, I guess it must be covid" -- they're not fucking idiots. When cancer patients die because their cancer treatment was cancelled they die of a cancer related cause, and that's how their death will be recorded, and that's how their death will be reported. > And we've never even made a serious effort to track the cause of death of the elderly. It's hard to understand your "we" here. Which country doesn't try to track cause of death for elderly people? > Meaning we don't know how many people die each year from the flu, But we can count the deaths the same way. We can look at deaths of people confirmed to have the disease, we can look at death certificates, we can look at excess mortality combined with community surveillance. The errors for all three are going to be similar for flu and covid-19.
    - gizmo 6y ago
      > But we can count the deaths the same way. When person in an elderly care facility dies we don't do a forensic investigation. We just shrug and say "I guess it was their time". So we don't have an accurate mortality baseline to do any comparison against. And that's assuming we are accurately distinguishing between those who died of covid19 and those who died with covid19, which we don't. I'm not suggesting that people who draw conclusions from incomplete data are idiots, I'm pointing out that the data we have is completely insufficient to make an accurate assessment of covid19 mortality.
      - alkonaut 6y ago
        I think this is why excess all cause deaths will be the best evaluation. Lots of people who die from Covid in care homes are people who would have died from this years flu anyway. They aren't excess deaths, they are the baseline deaths.
        gizmo 6y ago
        I agree that 'excess all cause deaths' is an important metric, but we still have to correct for clear biases in both directions. E.g. fewer traffic deaths because of a lockdown.
- throwaway13337 6y ago
  This is what's concerning all over the world. We know that death rates with the disease vary a lot due to attribution. We really can't get a good comparison as influenza isn't usually attributed as the main cause of death but coronavirus is. We can only look at all cause mortality rates which is quite the lagging indicator. https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ The best we have.
  - DanBC 6y ago
    > as influenza isn't usually attributed as the main cause of death but coronavirus is. What makes you say this?
    - thu2111 6y ago
      The UK made SARS-CoV-2 a "notifiable disease" which means by law any death from it must be reported to central government and it must be allocated to that death when present. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19... But there’s another, potentially even more serious problem: the way that deaths are recorded. If someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare ‘notifiable disease’. So the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK are recorded as bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age or a similar designation. We don’t really test for flu, or other seasonal infections. If the patient has, say, cancer, motor neurone disease or another serious disease, this will be recorded as the cause of death, even if the final illness was a respiratory infection. This means UK certifications normally under-record deaths due to respiratory infections. Now look at what has happened since the emergence of Covid-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list — as well as containing smallpox (which has been extinct for many years) and conditions such as anthrax, brucellosis, plague and rabies (which most UK doctors will never see in their entire careers) — has now been amended to include Covid-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections.
      - 6y ago
polack 6y ago
During the last four influenza seasons the average deaths was 685 and the worst season was 2017−2018 when a bit more than 1100 people died. Source: https://www.socialstyrelsen.se/globalassets/sharepoint-dokument/artikelkatalog/statistik/2020-4-6737.pdf https://www.socialstyrelsen.se/globalassets/sharepoint-dokum...
- matthiasl 6y ago
  That difference seems to arise because the report you cite uses a broad definition of influenza deaths. Page 2 says they're counting patients who "have influenza as a contributing or underlying cause of death, plus patients who received specialist care with an influenza diagnosis who subsequently died within 30 days". In any case, boosting the number to 685 still isn't enough so that covid is "double at most", and boosting it to 1100 isn't enough either.
  - polack 6y ago
    As far as I know they have an even broader definition of corona deaths in Sweden. My point is more that statistics is hard. You tried to debunk someones "dodgy" statistics with your own numbers that can be twisted to be even more off than the person you tried dismiss. I'm afraid nobody and everybody will be right after this is over. People will always find statistics to prove their points and that they where right and the other people where wrong.
judofyr 6y ago
> Sweden's official death toll was 2270 yesterday (2020-04-28). The three worst influenza seasons in Sweden since 1969 killed 807, 674 and 652 people[1]. So we've already passed his "at most" claim. The only way I can see that working out is if he feels that none of the influenza seasons in the past 50 years count as "severe". > [1]: numbers taken from the Swedish wikipedia entry on influenza. I didn't bother to check wikipedia's source. An average Swedish influenza season kills about 200. Sorry, but you can't just throw around numbers without explaining exactly what they mean or where they come from. The numbers you're quoting is most likely deaths that has been diagnozed as influenza. To get the full picture you need to look at excess mortality (which is reported by EuroMOMO[1]) and possibly adjust the numbers to pick out the influenza-related excess (FluMOMO[2] is the model most countries use). If you look at the 2016/2017 season in Sweden [3, figure 17, page 46] you will see that the excess mortality as reported by FluMOMO goes way beyond ~600 for a season. In the peak season we see that it was ~300 per week. There are of course uncertainties in these numbers (which is why you won't see any official "x number of people died of influenza" figures), but it was probably closer to thousands than hundreds in 2016/2017. [1]: https://www.euromomo.eu/ https://www.euromomo.eu/ [2]: https://www.euromomo.eu/how-it-works/flumomo https://www.euromomo.eu/how-it-works/flumomo [3]: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publicerat-material/publikationsarkiv/i/influenza-in-sweden-2016-2017-season/ https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publicerat-material/publ...
- matthiasl 6y ago
  > you can't just throw around numbers without explaining exactly what they mean or where they come from. In the interview, Gieseke says influenza kills 1000 to 2000 people per year in Sweden, it's part of the exchange starting at 24:16. He doesn't explain exactly what those numbers mean or where they come from. A minute or two later, he guards his 'double' comment by saying it's not going to be 10x. One interpretation of the exchange is that he's predicting 2000-4000 deaths in Sweden, and definitely not 20000.

alkonaut 6y ago

> he only way I can see that working out is if he feels that none of the influenza seasons in the past 50 years count as "severe". Or that he doesn't think deaths in past influenza seasons were all attributed to influenza but rather just "normal" deaths. The excess all-cause deaths will be the figure to look at, but it will take quite a while before those numbers are reliable.

gizmo 6y ago
But the excess death data will also be tainted because people, especially older people, avoid going to hospitals out of fear of catching covid19. Cancer screenings are way down, and fewer people go to the ER with heart attacks and the like. This will inevitably lead to excess mortality down the road --even among otherwise healthy people--, but it will be very hard to determine the magnitude of this second-order effect. Of course it's also very hard to distinguish between people dying with covid19 and dying because of it. And we've never even made a serious effort to track the cause of death of the elderly. Meaning we don't know how many people die each year from the flu, and we don't know how many people are dying of covid19. When you add it all up, it will be very difficult to learn the right lessons from this pandemic.
- DanBC 6y ago
  That's not what excess mortality means. They don't say "this many extra people died, I guess it must be covid" -- they're not fucking idiots. When cancer patients die because their cancer treatment was cancelled they die of a cancer related cause, and that's how their death will be recorded, and that's how their death will be reported. > And we've never even made a serious effort to track the cause of death of the elderly. It's hard to understand your "we" here. Which country doesn't try to track cause of death for elderly people? > Meaning we don't know how many people die each year from the flu, But we can count the deaths the same way. We can look at deaths of people confirmed to have the disease, we can look at death certificates, we can look at excess mortality combined with community surveillance. The errors for all three are going to be similar for flu and covid-19.
  - gizmo 6y ago
    > But we can count the deaths the same way. When person in an elderly care facility dies we don't do a forensic investigation. We just shrug and say "I guess it was their time". So we don't have an accurate mortality baseline to do any comparison against. And that's assuming we are accurately distinguishing between those who died of covid19 and those who died with covid19, which we don't. I'm not suggesting that people who draw conclusions from incomplete data are idiots, I'm pointing out that the data we have is completely insufficient to make an accurate assessment of covid19 mortality.
    - alkonaut 6y ago
      I think this is why excess all cause deaths will be the best evaluation. Lots of people who die from Covid in care homes are people who would have died from this years flu anyway. They aren't excess deaths, they are the baseline deaths.
      - gizmo 6y ago
        I agree that 'excess all cause deaths' is an important metric, but we still have to correct for clear biases in both directions. E.g. fewer traffic deaths because of a lockdown.
throwaway13337 6y ago
This is what's concerning all over the world. We know that death rates with the disease vary a lot due to attribution. We really can't get a good comparison as influenza isn't usually attributed as the main cause of death but coronavirus is. We can only look at all cause mortality rates which is quite the lagging indicator. https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ The best we have.
- DanBC 6y ago
  > as influenza isn't usually attributed as the main cause of death but coronavirus is. What makes you say this?
  - thu2111 6y ago
    The UK made SARS-CoV-2 a "notifiable disease" which means by law any death from it must be reported to central government and it must be allocated to that death when present. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19... But there’s another, potentially even more serious problem: the way that deaths are recorded. If someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare ‘notifiable disease’. So the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK are recorded as bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age or a similar designation. We don’t really test for flu, or other seasonal infections. If the patient has, say, cancer, motor neurone disease or another serious disease, this will be recorded as the cause of death, even if the final illness was a respiratory infection. This means UK certifications normally under-record deaths due to respiratory infections. Now look at what has happened since the emergence of Covid-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list — as well as containing smallpox (which has been extinct for many years) and conditions such as anthrax, brucellosis, plague and rabies (which most UK doctors will never see in their entire careers) — has now been amended to include Covid-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections.
    - 6y ago

polack 6y ago

During the last four influenza seasons the average deaths was 685 and the worst season was 2017−2018 when a bit more than 1100 people died. Source: https://www.socialstyrelsen.se/globalassets/sharepoint-dokument/artikelkatalog/statistik/2020-4-6737.pdf https://www.socialstyrelsen.se/globalassets/sharepoint-dokum...

matthiasl 6y ago
That difference seems to arise because the report you cite uses a broad definition of influenza deaths. Page 2 says they're counting patients who "have influenza as a contributing or underlying cause of death, plus patients who received specialist care with an influenza diagnosis who subsequently died within 30 days". In any case, boosting the number to 685 still isn't enough so that covid is "double at most", and boosting it to 1100 isn't enough either.
- polack 6y ago
  As far as I know they have an even broader definition of corona deaths in Sweden. My point is more that statistics is hard. You tried to debunk someones "dodgy" statistics with your own numbers that can be twisted to be even more off than the person you tried dismiss. I'm afraid nobody and everybody will be right after this is over. People will always find statistics to prove their points and that they where right and the other people where wrong.

judofyr 6y ago

> Sweden's official death toll was 2270 yesterday (2020-04-28). The three worst influenza seasons in Sweden since 1969 killed 807, 674 and 652 people[1]. So we've already passed his "at most" claim. The only way I can see that working out is if he feels that none of the influenza seasons in the past 50 years count as "severe". > [1]: numbers taken from the Swedish wikipedia entry on influenza. I didn't bother to check wikipedia's source. An average Swedish influenza season kills about 200. Sorry, but you can't just throw around numbers without explaining exactly what they mean or where they come from. The numbers you're quoting is most likely deaths that has been diagnozed as influenza. To get the full picture you need to look at excess mortality (which is reported by EuroMOMO[1]) and possibly adjust the numbers to pick out the influenza-related excess (FluMOMO[2] is the model most countries use). If you look at the 2016/2017 season in Sweden [3, figure 17, page 46] you will see that the excess mortality as reported by FluMOMO goes way beyond ~600 for a season. In the peak season we see that it was ~300 per week. There are of course uncertainties in these numbers (which is why you won't see any official "x number of people died of influenza" figures), but it was probably closer to thousands than hundreds in 2016/2017. [1]: https://www.euromomo.eu/ https://www.euromomo.eu/ [2]: https://www.euromomo.eu/how-it-works/flumomo https://www.euromomo.eu/how-it-works/flumomo [3]: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publicerat-material/publikationsarkiv/i/influenza-in-sweden-2016-2017-season/ https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publicerat-material/publ...

matthiasl 6y ago
> you can't just throw around numbers without explaining exactly what they mean or where they come from. In the interview, Gieseke says influenza kills 1000 to 2000 people per year in Sweden, it's part of the exchange starting at 24:16. He doesn't explain exactly what those numbers mean or where they come from. A minute or two later, he guards his 'double' comment by saying it's not going to be 10x. One interpretation of the exchange is that he's predicting 2000-4000 deaths in Sweden, and definitely not 20000.