4 ms·

Or people not going to the hospital in time because they are afraid of covid.

• corty 6y ago
  Yes, but there are also effects of lockdowns, shortened flu season, etc that lower mortality. E.g. Germany has practically zero excess mortality this year (within the usual variation). So people avoiding hospitals also shouldn't be a very large effect, at least over here. It will be interesting, when it's all over and all numbers are in, to look at the statistics of this.
• AmericanChopper 6y ago
  Or any number of other potentially unknown factors resulting from the completely unprescendented disruption to normal life that has been going on across the world for a number of months. Anybody claiming to know specifically what to expect from something that has never happened before should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism. Especially if their only way of taking measurements is so imprecise and inconsistently applied.
• hutzlibu 6y ago
  Or people killing themself, because their economic base is destroyed.
• dredmorbius 6y ago
  The larger point is that increased mortality attributable to there being a global pandemic can be considered a consequence of the pandemic. The deaths may not be directly attributable to the infectious agent and disease mechanism of SARS-COV-2 or COVID-19, that is, the virus or disease. But they are, in the absence of another plausible causal mechanism, part of the overall impact on public health. Gross mortality anomoly is the truest measure of impact. (Deeper discussions of causality and epistemology omitted.)