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There's a large amount of evidence that COVID deaths tolls are hugely inflated. Just consider the problematic of/with confusion. The average age of the deceased

There's a large amount of evidence that COVID deaths tolls are hugely inflated. Just consider the problematic of/with confusion. The average age of the deceased in most countries is over 80 i.e. greater than the average life expectancy. About 1/3rd of the excess deaths in the UK don't mention COVID anywhere on the death certificate at all. Of those that do, many of them have been reported as "caused by COVID" although when examined more closely the death certificate actually said something like "died of X, tested positive for COVID" or even "died of X, suspected COVID" where X is unrelated to the virus. This is possible due to significantly relaxed reporting standards, especially in care homes. And that's before you get into the cases just openly misattributed by the press. Georgia and Florida so far this year have reported Pneumonia deaths at something like 4x the rate of any prior year Ironically enough that's a left-wing talking point, but it's not actually backed up by evidence. In fact it's fake news. https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/29/theres-a-new-theory-about-florida-coronavirus-and-pneumonia-deaths-read-this-first/ https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/29/theres-a-new... "A theory that spread on Twitter and Reddit this week insinuating Florida health officials have masked the toll of the coronavirus by labeling thousands of deaths as caused by pneumonia is not supported by facts, said experts who study morbidity statistics. Nevertheless, the idea has spread rapidly, appearing to originate with a couple of widely shared and poorly sourced screenshots. It was picked up and swallowed along partisan divisions" "In an analysis he ran for the Times using publicly available data, Andrew Noymer, a professor who studies population health and disease prevention at the University of California Irvine, did not find major discrepancies between pneumonia and influenza deaths in early 2020 compared to recent years. He found about 1,485 such deaths in 2020, which was within a few hundred of the same period in any year since 2015." The of/with confusion is highlighted in this story as a key problem: "People, [Howard, the University of Texas at San Antonio professor] said, frequently die from multiple causes. It’s hard to attribute a death to just a single reason. Some Floridians might be avoiding needed medical attention out of fear, he said, and then they could die of an untreated illness or condition like heart disease."

joshuamorton 6y ago
> There's a large amount of evidence that COVID deaths tolls are hugely inflated. Just consider the problematic of/with confusion. This is not evidence. This is a conjecture. It isn't borne out by evidence. > https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/29/theres-a-new.. https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/29/theres-a-new.... From the same article: > That doesn’t the state’s coronavirus death toll is complete. Working with a University of South Florida researcher, the Times last week published a more complicated picture when it comes to excess deaths. That work found the pandemic might have already led to a toll between 17 percent and 58 percent higher than what had been reported. Which is this article: https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/20/coronavirus-may-have-caused-hundreds-of-additional-deaths-in-florida/ https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/20/coronavirus-... > They found that during the 5-week period ending April 25, there had been hundreds of unexpected deaths from illness and disease across Florida, more than can be explained by the coronavirus death count. Indeed these kinds of analysis have been done in multiple nations (http://archive.md/EBmj5 http://archive.md/EBmj5), and show that, without looking at cause at all, death rates are above official figures. Please explain how covid death tolls are hugely inflated if an analysis that entirely ignores cause of death, and only focuses on population level statistics, shows that there's been an unexplained increase in death rate beyond what has been attributed to COVID. Is there some other global pandemic that would be inflating death rates? To phrase this another way, population level mortality in 2020 is greater than average population level mortality over the past few years + deaths attributed to COVID-19. This gap appeared only after the pandemic began. If COVID-19 were being overreported, we'd expect the opposite effect. The evidence points to it being underreported. > Just consider the problematic of/with confusion. Your weekly reminder that while the life expectancy at birth is 78 years, the life expectancy of an 80 year old person is usually still 5-10 years. Statistics can be weird like that.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Yes, I know that article makes multiple claims about excess deaths. I cited it to show you that the claim about Florida pneumonia deaths isn't real, it's just a conspiracy theory. I'm not claiming everything published by the Tampa Bay Times is correct. I think that point landed, as you didn't mention it again. Now the other claim made in that article, the one you're now citing, it isn't logically valid. It makes the following inference: 1. If more people die on average during the past weeks, the cause of death must be CV. 2. Therefore if the death count of CV doesn't match excess deaths, there's been undercounting. It's invalid because it assumes lockdowns have no effect on mortality. This is a very strange assumption to make, but it must be widespread because I've seen people here on HN argue that "the economy" is some optional thing that shouldn't be weighed up against people's lives, for example. In practice the economy is what keeps us alive. It's not just restaurants and movies. Damaging it hurts or kills people. We'd absolutely expect there to be excess deaths from a lockdown both during and after it ends, and there's plenty of evidence of that happening. During a lockdown access to healthcare services become restricted or people became afraid to go to the hospitals, or even afraid to go outside. In the UK cardiac admissions to the emergency rooms halved overnight when the government started telling people to avoid hospitals and cancelled all "optional" operations (not really optional of course, just delayable with some risk). Some people pulled their own teeth out because emergency dentistry was closed. And in fairness to the article, it does say that - in the very next sentence after the part you quote: > Health experts say that likely includes some people who died of coronavirus but were never diagnosed as well as others who might have lived had the pandemic not kept them from getting care. So basically they don't know. > Please explain how covid death tolls are hugely inflated if an analysis that entirely ignores cause of death, and only focuses on population level statistics, shows that there's been an unexplained increase in death rate beyond what has been attributed to COVID These are two related but different arguments. COVID is a real virus that has increased the excess death rate, absolutely, although not really more than a bad flu season. "COVID deaths" are a count of all attributed deaths, not just the excess over the average. Imagine if every single death was reported as a COVID death. Obviously everyone would know that isn't true because deaths of other causes don't stop because there's a virus around. Now imagine that 80% of all deaths suddenly become reported as "died of COVID" whilst excess deaths went up by 10%. People would still call shenanigans because it'd be obvious that this couldn't be the case. But this can be the case if the report is actually "died WITH COVID". Then suddenly it's possible for 80% of people to die with it, and also for excess deaths to only go up by 10%. In practice all numbers reported as "died of" are in reality "died with" so this is a real issue. Consider a theoretical virus called disease X. It's highly infectious and infects 50% of all people, but actually causes no symptoms and kills nobody at all. Its mortality rate is zero. Imagine that a few powerful people didn't know that and believed otherwise, and mandated that all deaths where the virus was detected via some clever test be reported to them centrally, and those reports went out as "died of disease X". In such a situation the virus would act as effectively a random labelling function. People would just get this label in their bloodstream but it wouldn't actually affect them. Then it would be true that the death toll of disease X was hugely over-inflated, as it'd be zero in reality but via a chain of reporting errors would be reported as 50% of all deaths simply because it was present at the time of death. Finally, reconsider the above argument, but where 50% is adjusted to be lower than the excess death rate. The argument doesn't actually change at all: it's invariant to how many people get labelled. Any reports of death of disease X are an over-inflation, even if those numbers are smaller than the excess death count. Now, COVID isn't disease X. It does cause symptoms occasionally, in very rare cases it can cause death, usually people with very weak immune systems. But there's a whole lot of very compelling data showing it's pretty close to disease X. It labels a lot of people as "infected with COVID" even though it's not really affecting them much or at all. In that case, given the way reporting standards have been implemented, a whole lot of people will be reported as COVID deaths when in reality they died of something else. And importantly that statement can still be true even if the total number of "died of/with COVID" reports is lower than the excess death rate, if there are other factors also killing people, like lack of access to health care and increased suicides. To really figure out what happened with COVID will take a long time. It'll become clearer in retrospect, indeed it's already a lot clearer than when this all began. > Your weekly reminder that while the life expectancy at birth is 78 years, the life expectancy of an 80 year old person is usually still 5-10 years. Statistics can be weird like that. Interesting. Good point. I don't think it changes the argument above though.

joshuamorton 6y ago

> There's a large amount of evidence that COVID deaths tolls are hugely inflated. Just consider the problematic of/with confusion. This is not evidence. This is a conjecture. It isn't borne out by evidence. > https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/29/theres-a-new.. https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/29/theres-a-new.... From the same article: > That doesn’t the state’s coronavirus death toll is complete. Working with a University of South Florida researcher, the Times last week published a more complicated picture when it comes to excess deaths. That work found the pandemic might have already led to a toll between 17 percent and 58 percent higher than what had been reported. Which is this article: https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/20/coronavirus-may-have-caused-hundreds-of-additional-deaths-in-florida/ https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/20/coronavirus-... > They found that during the 5-week period ending April 25, there had been hundreds of unexpected deaths from illness and disease across Florida, more than can be explained by the coronavirus death count. Indeed these kinds of analysis have been done in multiple nations (http://archive.md/EBmj5 http://archive.md/EBmj5), and show that, without looking at cause at all, death rates are above official figures. Please explain how covid death tolls are hugely inflated if an analysis that entirely ignores cause of death, and only focuses on population level statistics, shows that there's been an unexplained increase in death rate beyond what has been attributed to COVID. Is there some other global pandemic that would be inflating death rates? To phrase this another way, population level mortality in 2020 is greater than average population level mortality over the past few years + deaths attributed to COVID-19. This gap appeared only after the pandemic began. If COVID-19 were being overreported, we'd expect the opposite effect. The evidence points to it being underreported. > Just consider the problematic of/with confusion. Your weekly reminder that while the life expectancy at birth is 78 years, the life expectancy of an 80 year old person is usually still 5-10 years. Statistics can be weird like that.

thu2111 6y ago
Yes, I know that article makes multiple claims about excess deaths. I cited it to show you that the claim about Florida pneumonia deaths isn't real, it's just a conspiracy theory. I'm not claiming everything published by the Tampa Bay Times is correct. I think that point landed, as you didn't mention it again. Now the other claim made in that article, the one you're now citing, it isn't logically valid. It makes the following inference: 1. If more people die on average during the past weeks, the cause of death must be CV. 2. Therefore if the death count of CV doesn't match excess deaths, there's been undercounting. It's invalid because it assumes lockdowns have no effect on mortality. This is a very strange assumption to make, but it must be widespread because I've seen people here on HN argue that "the economy" is some optional thing that shouldn't be weighed up against people's lives, for example. In practice the economy is what keeps us alive. It's not just restaurants and movies. Damaging it hurts or kills people. We'd absolutely expect there to be excess deaths from a lockdown both during and after it ends, and there's plenty of evidence of that happening. During a lockdown access to healthcare services become restricted or people became afraid to go to the hospitals, or even afraid to go outside. In the UK cardiac admissions to the emergency rooms halved overnight when the government started telling people to avoid hospitals and cancelled all "optional" operations (not really optional of course, just delayable with some risk). Some people pulled their own teeth out because emergency dentistry was closed. And in fairness to the article, it does say that - in the very next sentence after the part you quote: > Health experts say that likely includes some people who died of coronavirus but were never diagnosed as well as others who might have lived had the pandemic not kept them from getting care. So basically they don't know. > Please explain how covid death tolls are hugely inflated if an analysis that entirely ignores cause of death, and only focuses on population level statistics, shows that there's been an unexplained increase in death rate beyond what has been attributed to COVID These are two related but different arguments. COVID is a real virus that has increased the excess death rate, absolutely, although not really more than a bad flu season. "COVID deaths" are a count of all attributed deaths, not just the excess over the average. Imagine if every single death was reported as a COVID death. Obviously everyone would know that isn't true because deaths of other causes don't stop because there's a virus around. Now imagine that 80% of all deaths suddenly become reported as "died of COVID" whilst excess deaths went up by 10%. People would still call shenanigans because it'd be obvious that this couldn't be the case. But this can be the case if the report is actually "died WITH COVID". Then suddenly it's possible for 80% of people to die with it, and also for excess deaths to only go up by 10%. In practice all numbers reported as "died of" are in reality "died with" so this is a real issue. Consider a theoretical virus called disease X. It's highly infectious and infects 50% of all people, but actually causes no symptoms and kills nobody at all. Its mortality rate is zero. Imagine that a few powerful people didn't know that and believed otherwise, and mandated that all deaths where the virus was detected via some clever test be reported to them centrally, and those reports went out as "died of disease X". In such a situation the virus would act as effectively a random labelling function. People would just get this label in their bloodstream but it wouldn't actually affect them. Then it would be true that the death toll of disease X was hugely over-inflated, as it'd be zero in reality but via a chain of reporting errors would be reported as 50% of all deaths simply because it was present at the time of death. Finally, reconsider the above argument, but where 50% is adjusted to be lower than the excess death rate. The argument doesn't actually change at all: it's invariant to how many people get labelled. Any reports of death of disease X are an over-inflation, even if those numbers are smaller than the excess death count. Now, COVID isn't disease X. It does cause symptoms occasionally, in very rare cases it can cause death, usually people with very weak immune systems. But there's a whole lot of very compelling data showing it's pretty close to disease X. It labels a lot of people as "infected with COVID" even though it's not really affecting them much or at all. In that case, given the way reporting standards have been implemented, a whole lot of people will be reported as COVID deaths when in reality they died of something else. And importantly that statement can still be true even if the total number of "died of/with COVID" reports is lower than the excess death rate, if there are other factors also killing people, like lack of access to health care and increased suicides. To really figure out what happened with COVID will take a long time. It'll become clearer in retrospect, indeed it's already a lot clearer than when this all began. > Your weekly reminder that while the life expectancy at birth is 78 years, the life expectancy of an 80 year old person is usually still 5-10 years. Statistics can be weird like that. Interesting. Good point. I don't think it changes the argument above though.