7 ms·

35% of excess deaths from pandemic not caused by Covid-19

85 points by jtbayly 6y ago

shiftpgdn 6y ago
I have been shouting from the roof tops that if we don't implement some sort of UBI and second string PPP program we are going to see many more people die deaths of desperation as their economic livleyhoods are stripped away.
- hartator 6y ago
  Suicide is up in every countries with lockdowns. “Generous” money printing or not.
  - DanBC 6y ago
    > Suicide is up in every countries with lockdowns You can't say this. You haven't looked at the stats. England had a lockdown. What stats are you using for the UK?
  - wittyreference 6y ago
    You're making a huge claim. Data, please. The US, as far as I have seen, hasn't released any meaningful updates in suicide numbers for 2020, against a backdrop of suicide rates climbing since '99.
  - thebean11 6y ago
    Sure but it can always go up more, like when the extra unemployment money ends (if we're talking about the US).
  - svaha1728 6y ago
    Pandemics, historically, have never been fun.
  - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
    The suicide rate from 1999 until 2019 increased by 35%[1]. It's been an unaddressed growing systemic issue for a long time. As of June 23, the COVID death rate was 36 per 100,000[2] in just a handful of months. As of 2019 the average suicide rate was 14 per 100,000[1]. Unless that suicide rate does an unprecedented 250% jump it's not going to have the impact Covid has had so far, not to mention the rest of the year, which as we can see is going to be messy given the rate of increases (many of the current hotspots had a big jump in deaths per day the last couple of days). It's tragic that suicide is increasing, it really is, but COVID is the far greater threat. [1]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db362.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db362.htm [2]https://www.statista.com/chart/21170/coronavirus-death-rate-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/chart/21170/coronavirus-death-rate-...
    - BurningFrog 6y ago
      Here is a doctor claiming they've seen a 13x increase (+1200%) in suicides: https://abc7news.com/health/suicides-on-the-rise-amid-stay-at-home-order-bay-area-doctors-say/6201962/ https://abc7news.com/health/suicides-on-the-rise-amid-stay-a...
      - hasty 6y ago
        He later retracted that, as it wasn't true: https://www.redding.com/story/news/2020/05/29/no-bay-area-hospital-has-not-seen-a-years-worth-suicides-coronavirus/5279780002/ https://www.redding.com/story/news/2020/05/29/no-bay-area-ho...
        BurningFrog 6y ago
        That's an awesome find, thank you!
- 50ckpuppet 6y ago
  Or just fix the health care system so a family of four doesn't have to spend thousands every year before they get a single band-aid.
guscost 6y ago
So far. Secondary effects from lockdown will continue long after the pandemic wave is over. For example, consider how many people delayed a cancer screening or treatment in the last few months. If anyone who loses a month of life to respiratory disease is a “COVID death”, then anyone who loses a year to cancer, because they waited to treat it, is a “lockdown death”, right?
- orwin 6y ago
  If you know people around Bergame in Italy or Mulhouse in France, please ask them how it was, how it felt. How much did the 210% and 185% excess death affected them. Will the death of one of her child and her ex-husband will make the parent living a bit north, around Strasbourg, suicide, or is will this be caused by lockdown? What about the 26 year old dancer that will never be able to perform at the same level that she did before getting infected unless we manage to find a new medical technique to remove her lung scars? Will she work at Macdonald's now? Europe is mostly out of lockdown right now and yes, lockdown caused deaths too. But look at the addict admission to the hospital in Strsabourg/Mulhouse/Colmar and those in Britanny during the lockdown. Not having a crisis and only a lockdown did kill people, but not nearly as much as havong a crisis. In colmar, they had to close 3/4 or their bed usually used for alcoholic coma and/or OD. Im pretty sure it wasn't the case in Britanny. Maybe you're right about the lockdown in the US though. It might have flattened the curve enough in some state and might have been useless in others, but it is obviously not working as well as it did in europe.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    Im not sure how europe handled the hospitals during the shutdown. In the US, they basically stopped serving the public aside from COVID-19. I know someone who was scheduled for major heart surgery, which has been postponed indefinitely. He could easily fall into the excess mortality category. Meanwhile, hospitals are furloughing employees due lack of patients everywhere besides the hotspots. My specific gripe is not with the lockdowns themselves, but with how the hospitals have reacted by essentially abandoning anyone who suffers from other diseasese.
- 6y ago
pwinnski 6y ago
It would be nice if we counted COVID-19 deaths the way we count flu deaths, which is generally using the "excess deaths" figure. Why some states would go with "50% of excess deaths" or "65% of excess deaths" seems like an odd choice. Are there non-political reasons for doing that?
- pwinnski 6y ago
  It seems that we are much more generous in how we count flu deaths, so that 15,620[0] confirmed tracked deaths in the most recent flu season ends up as an estimated 42,000. All the comparisons I've seen this year have been using the 24,000-62,000 flu estimate uncritically when comparing to COVID-19, but apples to apples is apparently 15,620 for flu and 132,056 for COVID-19[1]. Perhaps flu-like estimates will come later, since the CDC tends to wait until the end of flu seasons to release those numbers. We're clearly nowhere near the end of COVID-19 season. [0] https://news.yahoo.com/flu-deaths-were-counted-covid-053449918.html https://news.yahoo.com/flu-deaths-were-counted-covid-0534499... [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/case...
  - Jedd 6y ago
    How we count flu deaths ... where?
    - pwinnski 6y ago
      The CDC, in America.
  - sparrish 6y ago
    When is the end of COVID-19 season? Why would the COVID-19 season have different dates than the flu season?
    - pwinnski 6y ago
      We have a very long history with the flu, and know that historically, the season ends around March every year. COVID-19 is new, and was barely getting started in March. Despite early claims that it would definitely taper off in the summer, apparently based on the fact that the flu does, it is not tapering off at all. We have no idea when COVID-19 will taper off, or if it will before herd immunity is reached (with or without a vaccine). So we don't know yet when the end will be, and they have different dates because they are different viruses.
duxup 6y ago
>up to 35% of excess deaths during the early phase of the pandemic may not have been directly due to COVID-19 Does that mean the other 65% of excess deaths were or "may have been" due to COVID?
- xlm1717 6y ago
  You can read the article before commenting, you know.
  - duxup 6y ago
    I did, I honestly did not feel it was very clear about ANYTHING it said. There's so many "may" and non specific statements, etc that I'm not at all sure what it is it is saying.
jeffbee 6y ago
I wonder how officials record deaths where the person was just found dead. Do they try to figure out the causes of death? It was reported in New York City that the rate at which firefighters and paramedics were finding dead people at home had increased by 10x over normal rates. They were finding 200 or more people daily.
- danans 6y ago
  Unfortunately, in many places tests were not being performed as part of the autopsy, so to understand how many of those were Covid19 deaths, researchers will have to use a model derived from known cases and causes of death.
tkeAmarktinClss 6y ago
I've been saying this since the start. Unless we lockdown for 2 years, 100% of people would negatively be affected. If we lockdown for 2 years 99.5% of people would be negatively affected. If we didn't lockdown at all, 0.5% of people would negatively be affected. This is basic statistics to me. But our leaders have never taken a statistics class and merely relied on physician testimonials. Who are obviously not taking into consideration big picture problems.
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  How on earth does a knowledge of basic statistics get you in possession of such dramatic and specific numbers? The way you've written, it looks like you're practicing clairvoyance.
- asa4akj 6y ago
  you are forgetting the part where hospitals got overrun even with lockdowns.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    Yep. This is why statisticians take more than "basic statistics".
  - watwut 6y ago
    Which Country went to early lockdown and had hospitals overrun? Like, none at all, the countries with overrun hospitals were locking down when situations was already almost there.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      Wuhan locked down before hospitals were overrun - there were only a handful of deaths by Jan 23. The lagging nature of cases, severe cases, and deaths means locking down needs to be well in advance of the spike to be completely effective.
      - 6y ago
qiqing 6y ago
Some sources of excess deaths: 1) In Wuhan, when the primary care taker(s) of a child or a disabled or elderly person suddenly become hospitalized and there's no opportunity to arrange backup care, there were many stories of when dependent is found deceased later. 2) Sometimes, a month or two after someone 'fully recovers' from Covid-19, they experience a blood clot. If that clot results in a stroke or heart attack... 3) Sometimes a Covid-19 survivor has organ damage significant enough to be on a transplant list. Due to fewer car accidents, the organ supply isn't what it used to be in the BC era...
- fuckyah 6y ago
  Anecdotes!
- thu2111 6y ago
  Problem is that inactivity is also known to cause blood clots and subsequent problems, hence deep vein thrombosis being linked with long distance flights. What happens during lockdown, people stop moving about and spend all day sitting at home. I think we need to be apply critical thinking to claims of the form, "some one recovered fully but then was struck down by covid19 a second time". That can easily be a correlation/causation fallacy.
devy 6y ago
According to the article, there are 2 types of excess deaths: - the virus can also cause death by exacerbating underlying health issues; the body’s immune system is weakened while fighting off the illness. - the sudden emergence and rapid spread of the disease overwhelmed critical care units when the virus was at its peak, reducing the amount of care any individual patient could receive. And the argument of "35% excess deaths not caused by COVID-19" is perhaps technically correct due to the reasons above, however, those are indirect deaths that had the root cause of SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus. Notice the difference between COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2? The former is the disease, the latter is the virus. As Dr. Mike Hansen said in a few of his autopsy report review videos he made in his YouTube channel[1], there are very few direct cause of death in the death certificate he signed and issued for his ICU patients, most related to blood clots and lack of oxygen but the common indirect cause is the SARS-CoV-2. In other words, if it weren't for the coronavirus infection, these deaths could either be prevented or delayed. So I think it's more nuanced than simply saying we are attributing 35% the excess deaths to COVID-19 whereas these are indirectly caused by SAR-CoV-2 viral outbreak. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6h8TIxeg1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6h8TIxeg1g
- jtbayly 6y ago
  No. You are not representing the article or the study accurately. There are many other reasons for excess deaths than the two you mentioned. From the article: >there were 96% more diabetes-related deaths than experts predicted. For heart disease, the figure was 89%; for Alzheimer’s disease, it was 64%; and for stroke, it was 35%. >As well as people not being able to get the necessary treatment due to hospitals being overloaded, the study authors also speculate that people may have stayed at home due to the virus despite experiencing worsening symptoms of another condition they may have had. >They also believe that the pandemic’s effects on people’s mental health may have played a part. >As Prof. Woolf notes: “We can’t forget about mental health. A number of people struggling with depression, addiction, and very difficult economic conditions caused by lockdowns may have become increasingly desperate, and some may have died by suicide. People addicted to opioids and other drugs may have overdosed.”
  - 6y ago
amitkapit 6y ago
Lockdowns and fear-spreading are a political decisions, regardless to if we judge them to be wrong or not. So, if people don't go to the doctor, that's because they are worried from what they watched on television. If hospitals collapse, that's because they are either not prepared, or have lots of staff in quarantine. That's not because of a virus, but because of how humans were prepared and chose to deal with the situation.
- watwut 6y ago
  This framing where any action that takes virus seriously is talked about as "fear" is quite manipulative political action too. Let's not pretend the "whether we judge it right or wrong" somehow removes it. So is attributing overloaded hospitals to "lots of staff in quarantine" given how it looked like in Italy or Spain or New York.
andor 6y ago
My suggestion is to skip the article and read the original paper instead: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768086 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768086 It's not any longer and written in clearer language. The paper simply summarizes the reported causes of excess death.
GuB-42 6y ago
The article is not what I expected. The 35% are deaths caused indirectly by the disease, not the results of things like change of behavior or economic downturns. The 35% are from people who supposedly recovered from Covid-19 but died later from complications or a weakened body. I still would call that Covid-19 deaths. In the same way that if you fall, break your leg, and later die from infection, we can still say that the fall caused your death, even though what sealed your fate is a bacteria and not mechanical damage.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  No. Read it again. Some are. Some aren't. We don't know what percent fall in each category.
  - ouid 6y ago
    How about you read the actual JAMA paper, and stop spreading your uninformed wishful thinking.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      How about you read the paper... Third sentence: > Moreover, restrictions imposed by the pandemic (eg, stay-at-home orders) could claim lives indirectly through delayed care for acute emergencies, exacerbations of chronic diseases, and psychological distress (eg, drug overdoses). Summary: >Large increases in mortality from heart disease, diabetes, and other diseases were observed. Further investigation is required to determine the extent to which these trends represent nonrespiratory manifestations of COVID-19 or secondary pandemic mortality caused by disruptions in society that diminished or delayed access to health care and the social determinants of health (eg, jobs, income, food security).
      - ouid 6y ago
        You are referring to the article written about the paper, whcih is engaging, at best, in wishful thinking, and at worst, propaganda. A doubling in the number of deaths associated with "diabetes" is absolutely not consistent with not seeing a doctor for your diabetes for 4 months. It's not like you aren't checking your blood sugar or aren't getting insulin. No, indeed the only reasonable explanation for the sudden doubling of diabetes related deaths, is that they are actually the result of covid. 35% is not inconsistent with the false negative rates on testing, which is precisely the reason that we are measuring excess deaths as an estimate of the number of people killed by covid.
SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
The explanation is simple. Tests are not reliable. This is what is happening now in Central Asia.
anon104 6y ago
Was this article run through Google Translate? It's horribly written.
noname123 6y ago
, sxzzs i

85 points by jtbayly 6y ago

I have been shouting from the roof tops that if we don't implement some sort of UBI and second string PPP program we are going to see many more people die deaths of desperation as their economic livleyhoods are stripped away.

hartator 6y ago
Suicide is up in every countries with lockdowns. “Generous” money printing or not.
- DanBC 6y ago
  > Suicide is up in every countries with lockdowns You can't say this. You haven't looked at the stats. England had a lockdown. What stats are you using for the UK?
- wittyreference 6y ago
  You're making a huge claim. Data, please. The US, as far as I have seen, hasn't released any meaningful updates in suicide numbers for 2020, against a backdrop of suicide rates climbing since '99.
- thebean11 6y ago
  Sure but it can always go up more, like when the extra unemployment money ends (if we're talking about the US).
- svaha1728 6y ago
  Pandemics, historically, have never been fun.
- SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
  The suicide rate from 1999 until 2019 increased by 35%[1]. It's been an unaddressed growing systemic issue for a long time. As of June 23, the COVID death rate was 36 per 100,000[2] in just a handful of months. As of 2019 the average suicide rate was 14 per 100,000[1]. Unless that suicide rate does an unprecedented 250% jump it's not going to have the impact Covid has had so far, not to mention the rest of the year, which as we can see is going to be messy given the rate of increases (many of the current hotspots had a big jump in deaths per day the last couple of days). It's tragic that suicide is increasing, it really is, but COVID is the far greater threat. [1]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db362.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db362.htm [2]https://www.statista.com/chart/21170/coronavirus-death-rate-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/chart/21170/coronavirus-death-rate-...
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    Here is a doctor claiming they've seen a 13x increase (+1200%) in suicides: https://abc7news.com/health/suicides-on-the-rise-amid-stay-at-home-order-bay-area-doctors-say/6201962/ https://abc7news.com/health/suicides-on-the-rise-amid-stay-a...
    - hasty 6y ago
      He later retracted that, as it wasn't true: https://www.redding.com/story/news/2020/05/29/no-bay-area-hospital-has-not-seen-a-years-worth-suicides-coronavirus/5279780002/ https://www.redding.com/story/news/2020/05/29/no-bay-area-ho...
      - BurningFrog 6y ago
        That's an awesome find, thank you!
50ckpuppet 6y ago
Or just fix the health care system so a family of four doesn't have to spend thousands every year before they get a single band-aid.

guscost 6y ago

So far. Secondary effects from lockdown will continue long after the pandemic wave is over. For example, consider how many people delayed a cancer screening or treatment in the last few months. If anyone who loses a month of life to respiratory disease is a “COVID death”, then anyone who loses a year to cancer, because they waited to treat it, is a “lockdown death”, right?

orwin 6y ago
If you know people around Bergame in Italy or Mulhouse in France, please ask them how it was, how it felt. How much did the 210% and 185% excess death affected them. Will the death of one of her child and her ex-husband will make the parent living a bit north, around Strasbourg, suicide, or is will this be caused by lockdown? What about the 26 year old dancer that will never be able to perform at the same level that she did before getting infected unless we manage to find a new medical technique to remove her lung scars? Will she work at Macdonald's now? Europe is mostly out of lockdown right now and yes, lockdown caused deaths too. But look at the addict admission to the hospital in Strsabourg/Mulhouse/Colmar and those in Britanny during the lockdown. Not having a crisis and only a lockdown did kill people, but not nearly as much as havong a crisis. In colmar, they had to close 3/4 or their bed usually used for alcoholic coma and/or OD. Im pretty sure it wasn't the case in Britanny. Maybe you're right about the lockdown in the US though. It might have flattened the curve enough in some state and might have been useless in others, but it is obviously not working as well as it did in europe.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Im not sure how europe handled the hospitals during the shutdown. In the US, they basically stopped serving the public aside from COVID-19. I know someone who was scheduled for major heart surgery, which has been postponed indefinitely. He could easily fall into the excess mortality category. Meanwhile, hospitals are furloughing employees due lack of patients everywhere besides the hotspots. My specific gripe is not with the lockdowns themselves, but with how the hospitals have reacted by essentially abandoning anyone who suffers from other diseasese.
6y ago

pwinnski 6y ago

It would be nice if we counted COVID-19 deaths the way we count flu deaths, which is generally using the "excess deaths" figure. Why some states would go with "50% of excess deaths" or "65% of excess deaths" seems like an odd choice. Are there non-political reasons for doing that?

pwinnski 6y ago
It seems that we are much more generous in how we count flu deaths, so that 15,620[0] confirmed tracked deaths in the most recent flu season ends up as an estimated 42,000. All the comparisons I've seen this year have been using the 24,000-62,000 flu estimate uncritically when comparing to COVID-19, but apples to apples is apparently 15,620 for flu and 132,056 for COVID-19[1]. Perhaps flu-like estimates will come later, since the CDC tends to wait until the end of flu seasons to release those numbers. We're clearly nowhere near the end of COVID-19 season. [0] https://news.yahoo.com/flu-deaths-were-counted-covid-053449918.html https://news.yahoo.com/flu-deaths-were-counted-covid-0534499... [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/case...
- Jedd 6y ago
  How we count flu deaths ... where?
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    The CDC, in America.
- sparrish 6y ago
  When is the end of COVID-19 season? Why would the COVID-19 season have different dates than the flu season?
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    We have a very long history with the flu, and know that historically, the season ends around March every year. COVID-19 is new, and was barely getting started in March. Despite early claims that it would definitely taper off in the summer, apparently based on the fact that the flu does, it is not tapering off at all. We have no idea when COVID-19 will taper off, or if it will before herd immunity is reached (with or without a vaccine). So we don't know yet when the end will be, and they have different dates because they are different viruses.

duxup 6y ago

>up to 35% of excess deaths during the early phase of the pandemic may not have been directly due to COVID-19 Does that mean the other 65% of excess deaths were or "may have been" due to COVID?

xlm1717 6y ago
You can read the article before commenting, you know.
- duxup 6y ago
  I did, I honestly did not feel it was very clear about ANYTHING it said. There's so many "may" and non specific statements, etc that I'm not at all sure what it is it is saying.

jeffbee 6y ago

I wonder how officials record deaths where the person was just found dead. Do they try to figure out the causes of death? It was reported in New York City that the rate at which firefighters and paramedics were finding dead people at home had increased by 10x over normal rates. They were finding 200 or more people daily.

danans 6y ago
Unfortunately, in many places tests were not being performed as part of the autopsy, so to understand how many of those were Covid19 deaths, researchers will have to use a model derived from known cases and causes of death.

tkeAmarktinClss 6y ago

I've been saying this since the start. Unless we lockdown for 2 years, 100% of people would negatively be affected. If we lockdown for 2 years 99.5% of people would be negatively affected. If we didn't lockdown at all, 0.5% of people would negatively be affected. This is basic statistics to me. But our leaders have never taken a statistics class and merely relied on physician testimonials. Who are obviously not taking into consideration big picture problems.

happytoexplain 6y ago
How on earth does a knowledge of basic statistics get you in possession of such dramatic and specific numbers? The way you've written, it looks like you're practicing clairvoyance.
asa4akj 6y ago
you are forgetting the part where hospitals got overrun even with lockdowns.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Yep. This is why statisticians take more than "basic statistics".
- watwut 6y ago
  Which Country went to early lockdown and had hospitals overrun? Like, none at all, the countries with overrun hospitals were locking down when situations was already almost there.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    Wuhan locked down before hospitals were overrun - there were only a handful of deaths by Jan 23. The lagging nature of cases, severe cases, and deaths means locking down needs to be well in advance of the spike to be completely effective.
    - 6y ago

qiqing 6y ago

Some sources of excess deaths: 1) In Wuhan, when the primary care taker(s) of a child or a disabled or elderly person suddenly become hospitalized and there's no opportunity to arrange backup care, there were many stories of when dependent is found deceased later. 2) Sometimes, a month or two after someone 'fully recovers' from Covid-19, they experience a blood clot. If that clot results in a stroke or heart attack... 3) Sometimes a Covid-19 survivor has organ damage significant enough to be on a transplant list. Due to fewer car accidents, the organ supply isn't what it used to be in the BC era...

fuckyah 6y ago
Anecdotes!
thu2111 6y ago
Problem is that inactivity is also known to cause blood clots and subsequent problems, hence deep vein thrombosis being linked with long distance flights. What happens during lockdown, people stop moving about and spend all day sitting at home. I think we need to be apply critical thinking to claims of the form, "some one recovered fully but then was struck down by covid19 a second time". That can easily be a correlation/causation fallacy.

devy 6y ago

According to the article, there are 2 types of excess deaths: - the virus can also cause death by exacerbating underlying health issues; the body’s immune system is weakened while fighting off the illness. - the sudden emergence and rapid spread of the disease overwhelmed critical care units when the virus was at its peak, reducing the amount of care any individual patient could receive. And the argument of "35% excess deaths not caused by COVID-19" is perhaps technically correct due to the reasons above, however, those are indirect deaths that had the root cause of SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus. Notice the difference between COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2? The former is the disease, the latter is the virus. As Dr. Mike Hansen said in a few of his autopsy report review videos he made in his YouTube channel[1], there are very few direct cause of death in the death certificate he signed and issued for his ICU patients, most related to blood clots and lack of oxygen but the common indirect cause is the SARS-CoV-2. In other words, if it weren't for the coronavirus infection, these deaths could either be prevented or delayed. So I think it's more nuanced than simply saying we are attributing 35% the excess deaths to COVID-19 whereas these are indirectly caused by SAR-CoV-2 viral outbreak. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6h8TIxeg1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6h8TIxeg1g

jtbayly 6y ago
No. You are not representing the article or the study accurately. There are many other reasons for excess deaths than the two you mentioned. From the article: >there were 96% more diabetes-related deaths than experts predicted. For heart disease, the figure was 89%; for Alzheimer’s disease, it was 64%; and for stroke, it was 35%. >As well as people not being able to get the necessary treatment due to hospitals being overloaded, the study authors also speculate that people may have stayed at home due to the virus despite experiencing worsening symptoms of another condition they may have had. >They also believe that the pandemic’s effects on people’s mental health may have played a part. >As Prof. Woolf notes: “We can’t forget about mental health. A number of people struggling with depression, addiction, and very difficult economic conditions caused by lockdowns may have become increasingly desperate, and some may have died by suicide. People addicted to opioids and other drugs may have overdosed.”
- 6y ago

amitkapit 6y ago

Lockdowns and fear-spreading are a political decisions, regardless to if we judge them to be wrong or not. So, if people don't go to the doctor, that's because they are worried from what they watched on television. If hospitals collapse, that's because they are either not prepared, or have lots of staff in quarantine. That's not because of a virus, but because of how humans were prepared and chose to deal with the situation.

watwut 6y ago
This framing where any action that takes virus seriously is talked about as "fear" is quite manipulative political action too. Let's not pretend the "whether we judge it right or wrong" somehow removes it. So is attributing overloaded hospitals to "lots of staff in quarantine" given how it looked like in Italy or Spain or New York.

andor 6y ago

My suggestion is to skip the article and read the original paper instead: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768086 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768086 It's not any longer and written in clearer language. The paper simply summarizes the reported causes of excess death.

GuB-42 6y ago

The article is not what I expected. The 35% are deaths caused indirectly by the disease, not the results of things like change of behavior or economic downturns. The 35% are from people who supposedly recovered from Covid-19 but died later from complications or a weakened body. I still would call that Covid-19 deaths. In the same way that if you fall, break your leg, and later die from infection, we can still say that the fall caused your death, even though what sealed your fate is a bacteria and not mechanical damage.

jtbayly 6y ago
No. Read it again. Some are. Some aren't. We don't know what percent fall in each category.
- ouid 6y ago
  How about you read the actual JAMA paper, and stop spreading your uninformed wishful thinking.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    How about you read the paper... Third sentence: > Moreover, restrictions imposed by the pandemic (eg, stay-at-home orders) could claim lives indirectly through delayed care for acute emergencies, exacerbations of chronic diseases, and psychological distress (eg, drug overdoses). Summary: >Large increases in mortality from heart disease, diabetes, and other diseases were observed. Further investigation is required to determine the extent to which these trends represent nonrespiratory manifestations of COVID-19 or secondary pandemic mortality caused by disruptions in society that diminished or delayed access to health care and the social determinants of health (eg, jobs, income, food security).
    - ouid 6y ago
      You are referring to the article written about the paper, whcih is engaging, at best, in wishful thinking, and at worst, propaganda. A doubling in the number of deaths associated with "diabetes" is absolutely not consistent with not seeing a doctor for your diabetes for 4 months. It's not like you aren't checking your blood sugar or aren't getting insulin. No, indeed the only reasonable explanation for the sudden doubling of diabetes related deaths, is that they are actually the result of covid. 35% is not inconsistent with the false negative rates on testing, which is precisely the reason that we are measuring excess deaths as an estimate of the number of people killed by covid.

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago

The explanation is simple. Tests are not reliable. This is what is happening now in Central Asia.

anon104 6y ago

Was this article run through Google Translate? It's horribly written.

noname123 6y ago

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