7 ms·

Johns Hopkins published a study saying corona is nbd. They then deleted it.

26 points by URfejk 6y ago

gwbas1c 6y ago
Deaths from Covid 19 aren't a big deal because we're all isolating ourselves and wearing masks so we don't spread it. If we didn't take proactive measures, deaths from Covid 19 would be a huge deal.
- Justin_K 6y ago
  Did you read the article? The point of the study was that covid has had no affect on the overall number of deaths. This is in contrast to most publications which cite at least 250,000 deaths.
  - BFatts 6y ago
    Did you read the article? The point of the study is to say that statistically this doesn't add up. Well, Covid is a once in every 100 years pandemic. Heart disease, influenza, and pneumonia occur every year. Trying to use statistical analysis is the wrong approach. To those who think this is your proof that covid was overblown, you haven't read the article.
    - anthonygd 6y ago
      In case you're serious: yes I have read the article. Of course a one off non-peer reviewed piece isn't proof of anything but it does reference interesting data. Heart disease, influenza, and pneumonia really are things that kill every year, so why don't you think they can be statistically analyzed? This year is different than previous years, but it seems odd if you're suggesting Covid is beneficial for heart disease.
  - gwbas1c 6y ago
    Yes, and I also read the published data from my state. We had a huge spike in deaths in March-May.
- gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  > If we didn't take proactive measures, deaths from Covid 19 would be a huge deal. Clearly a counterfactual that you can easily say without the burden of offering evidence.
Out_of_Characte 6y ago
A drop in deaths across all diseases is highly suspect. a part could be explained due to doctor visit restrictions caused by lockdowns and personal considerations yet death doesn't wait for a doctor's visit and would only come sooner. in 1-2 years time we'll have a proper graph of all deaths totalled and we'll know what the approximate impact covid had regardless of cause of death. The mangled graph shown in the article was edited by the original authors, not the journalist.
- BFatts 6y ago
  Why is it suspect? When someone dies of influenza in a year, but has heart disease, do we say they died of heart disease or influenza? I suspect influenza is the cause of death. Statistically, over the past 100 years we haven't HAD a pandemic, but wow here we are with one and everyone is fast to say "ignore the covid numbers, the real data is heart disease because it's been that way forever." Well, forever just got pushed outta the way.
  - eesmith 6y ago
    A death certificate may list multiple causes of death.
  - Out_of_Characte 6y ago
    I understand that cause of death is multivariable, like the complicated reduction in life expectancy due to poor habits, city smog, individual effects of smoking, etc. But if a person has heart disease and influenza on the table, shouldn't they statistically be worse off if covid might be in the mix as well? Regardless of which is written on the death certificate, the amount of supposed deaths 'caused' by covid even by minimal estimates should be significantly larger than the margin of error on death records we have. Total deaths per year ( including absolutely everything) 'only' totals 3 million which means 200k covid deaths is already 7% of that. the reported differences are interesting no matter how you cut it, either covid isn't as bad, or it is bad and people aren't dying of certain other causes. Alternatively the US really sucks at counting.
owenversteeg 6y ago
Interesting, Johns Hopkins said they deleted the study because it "was being used to support false and dangerous inaccuracies about the impact of the pandemic", and not because it was incorrect. Regardless of if it's correct, I think this has become such a political issue in the US that the American left would be very hard pressed to publicly accept this study's claims. I really hope that statisticians are able to look past their own personal convictions and look at possible ways our assumptions may have been incorrect. (Personally speaking, I wear a mask, I don't think the coronavirus is a giant conspiracy by the lizard people etc. but I do recognize that the modern scientific community has a tendency to think one way, and then remain cemented in that way for a while.)
- BFatts 6y ago
  Why would the American Left need to? Look, it's obvious how easy this is to manipulate. Tell people that every year people die at higher rates of these four causes, but in 2020 we don't see that happen but the Covid numbers are where we saw the increase. So covid is really just no big deal and Trump was always right." Am I getting the gist of where you're going with this? That the American right was always correct? Laughable. What this says is that in 2020 they didn't see the same numbers that they've always seen. Heart disease death counts aren't as high as they've always been. But wow, take a look at covid - those numbers are WAY up. To the observer who wants to say that covid isn't bad and is just the left's fever dream, this is the proof in the pudding. To the intelligent, highly educated left, this says "Covid is the biggest cause of death in 2020. The right is just looking for something else to point at because Trump said so." I believe the article is saying something, but it's not saying the right thing. Covid, in 2020, has been the biggest killer. Trying to identify an alternative cause is just wishful thinking.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- quotemstr 6y ago
  It's become sadly common to suppress true research results because gatekeepers are afraid of the wrong people using them. It's gotten so bad that when I see an instance of egregious academic censorship, I think to myself "Yep. That's probably true.". At both society and personal levels, the truth is always the best policy. Suppressing the truth, even for an ostensibly good reason, never ends well. Maybe there's something to the censored article. Maybe there isn't. But whenever I see heavy handed censorship, I have to ask myself, "is there something here?"
gwbas1c 6y ago
[Meta] May I suggest editing the title to "Johns Hopkins published a study saying corona is not a big deal. They then deleted it." I don't see "nbd" that often, and I suspect most Hacker News readers aren't going to realize what "nbd" is either. I opened the article because I thought "nbd" was some medical or scientific term.
- URfejk 6y ago
  I wanted to but the title would be too long so I couldn't do it.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  It's not even a study. It's just someone presenting a powerpoint. There's no published paper.
roywiggins 6y ago
This is apparently the result of an "assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s degree program" downloading the CDC data and playing with it. It's not even a study, it's just someone putting together some graphs. It's not clear that they have any experience in interpreting this sort of data, which is probably important. Random economists poking around datasets they don't understand have a habit of coming to weird conclusions that disappear when looked at by subject matter experts. I'm not sure it even counts as a study, where was it published? Is there a preprint somewhere? Is it just a PowerPoint presentation?
- URfejk 6y ago
  This is true, but that again someone had to approve this before it was put up on their site. That is what any serious institution would do.
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    It's a student paper, the author of the piece appears to be a neuroscience undergrad... I'm sure they're a fine student journalist but it's not exactly peer review.
    - TigeriusKirk 6y ago
      Now that you're firmly and repeatedly on record being skeptical of the author, what do you think is wrong about the content?
      - roywiggins 6y ago
        I don't know, there's no paper, it's just powerpoint slides. I have previously poked around NYC-area death statistics and it looks like 1) a massive spike in deaths by any cause that looks like several 9/11s followed by 2) a regression to the usual rate of deaths once COVID was largely brought to heel in the summer months. I can't imagine that the total number of deaths in NYC this year could possibly be the same as in 2019. But I'm not an expert. Ed: glancing over the CDC statistics, when COVID-attributed deaths go up, all-cause mortality goes up, too... by approximately the same amount. If a large proportion of those COVID deaths were mislabeled heart disease deaths, why is that? I made these graphs with the same CDC data: https://imgur.com/a/YejafCE https://imgur.com/a/YejafCE And of course, there's the CDC's own dashboard on excess deaths, which lets you slice this more finely. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
jamra 6y ago
Could the numbers be coming from a drop in influenza? Since we are socially distancing, influenza is probably way down seeing as how it’s less contagious than Covid.
- WalterSear 6y ago
  They are coming from the fact that this was an article written by an undergrad for their school newspaper.
sleepysysadmin 6y ago
The problem is that coronavirus got political. Not only did politicians get involved which means the probability of lies surrounding covid is 100% certain. That's what politicians do, they open their mouth and lies comes out. The problem is worse, the scientists and advisors also got political. Therefore people must question the veracity of the claims. That doesn't bring us to the current problem, the current problem goes much further. The censorship over all discussion about covid unless it specifically goes along with the politician's story. Then a huge number of tyrannical measures 'for our safety' and it doesn't look quite right. It makes everyone question what's going on. Want to fix the entire situation? Take the politicians out of the equation.
owenstar 6y ago
There should be a peak in US all-cause mortality around April, just like in the EU: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps Is there a similar graph for the US? I couldn't find it on CDC website
Overtonwindow 6y ago
It’s almost like universities have a tacit, political agenda ...
queeerkopf 6y ago
> Since COVID-19 mainly affects the elderly, experts expected an increase in the percentage of deaths in older age groups. However, this increase is not seen from the CDC data. In fact, the percentages of deaths among all age groups remain relatively the same. This directly contradicts the excess mortality data published by CDC itself. [1] From the article it's unclear to me what evidence led to the claims presented. So far the article seems very unconvincing. Seems like John Hopkins has good reasons to take it down. Also bear in mind that the excess mortality we've seen so far is with all the measures to limit the impact of the pandemic. It's fair to assume that excess mortality would be a lot higher without those. Our World In Data has a well explained international overview and analysis. [2][3] [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm [2] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid [3] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-excess-mortality https://ourworldindata.org/covid-excess-mortality
fabiofzero 6y ago
A quick look at the website where this was published should discourage anyone from sharing links from it. I know the HN crew will downvote this because 'murica but whatever.
Arnt 6y ago
Wasn't that the graphing-around that said that people are dying from Corona but the total number of deaths isn't increasing correspondingly, and quite possibly not at all? I found it quite interesting, but it sounded more like a reason to investigate than a result of investigation. For example, some non-Corona treatments are happening in much lower numbers than usually; how "should" that affect the number of deaths from the relevant causes and what numbers are actually observed? It's not sensible to draw conclusions about Corona from the number of other-cause deaths without also looking at the changes to other-cause reasons and treatments.

26 points by URfejk 6y ago

Deaths from Covid 19 aren't a big deal because we're all isolating ourselves and wearing masks so we don't spread it. If we didn't take proactive measures, deaths from Covid 19 would be a huge deal.

Justin_K 6y ago
Did you read the article? The point of the study was that covid has had no affect on the overall number of deaths. This is in contrast to most publications which cite at least 250,000 deaths.
- BFatts 6y ago
  Did you read the article? The point of the study is to say that statistically this doesn't add up. Well, Covid is a once in every 100 years pandemic. Heart disease, influenza, and pneumonia occur every year. Trying to use statistical analysis is the wrong approach. To those who think this is your proof that covid was overblown, you haven't read the article.
  - anthonygd 6y ago
    In case you're serious: yes I have read the article. Of course a one off non-peer reviewed piece isn't proof of anything but it does reference interesting data. Heart disease, influenza, and pneumonia really are things that kill every year, so why don't you think they can be statistically analyzed? This year is different than previous years, but it seems odd if you're suggesting Covid is beneficial for heart disease.
- gwbas1c 6y ago
  Yes, and I also read the published data from my state. We had a huge spike in deaths in March-May.
gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
> If we didn't take proactive measures, deaths from Covid 19 would be a huge deal. Clearly a counterfactual that you can easily say without the burden of offering evidence.

Out_of_Characte 6y ago

A drop in deaths across all diseases is highly suspect. a part could be explained due to doctor visit restrictions caused by lockdowns and personal considerations yet death doesn't wait for a doctor's visit and would only come sooner. in 1-2 years time we'll have a proper graph of all deaths totalled and we'll know what the approximate impact covid had regardless of cause of death. The mangled graph shown in the article was edited by the original authors, not the journalist.

BFatts 6y ago
Why is it suspect? When someone dies of influenza in a year, but has heart disease, do we say they died of heart disease or influenza? I suspect influenza is the cause of death. Statistically, over the past 100 years we haven't HAD a pandemic, but wow here we are with one and everyone is fast to say "ignore the covid numbers, the real data is heart disease because it's been that way forever." Well, forever just got pushed outta the way.
- eesmith 6y ago
  A death certificate may list multiple causes of death.
- Out_of_Characte 6y ago
  I understand that cause of death is multivariable, like the complicated reduction in life expectancy due to poor habits, city smog, individual effects of smoking, etc. But if a person has heart disease and influenza on the table, shouldn't they statistically be worse off if covid might be in the mix as well? Regardless of which is written on the death certificate, the amount of supposed deaths 'caused' by covid even by minimal estimates should be significantly larger than the margin of error on death records we have. Total deaths per year ( including absolutely everything) 'only' totals 3 million which means 200k covid deaths is already 7% of that. the reported differences are interesting no matter how you cut it, either covid isn't as bad, or it is bad and people aren't dying of certain other causes. Alternatively the US really sucks at counting.

owenversteeg 6y ago

Interesting, Johns Hopkins said they deleted the study because it "was being used to support false and dangerous inaccuracies about the impact of the pandemic", and not because it was incorrect. Regardless of if it's correct, I think this has become such a political issue in the US that the American left would be very hard pressed to publicly accept this study's claims. I really hope that statisticians are able to look past their own personal convictions and look at possible ways our assumptions may have been incorrect. (Personally speaking, I wear a mask, I don't think the coronavirus is a giant conspiracy by the lizard people etc. but I do recognize that the modern scientific community has a tendency to think one way, and then remain cemented in that way for a while.)

BFatts 6y ago
Why would the American Left need to? Look, it's obvious how easy this is to manipulate. Tell people that every year people die at higher rates of these four causes, but in 2020 we don't see that happen but the Covid numbers are where we saw the increase. So covid is really just no big deal and Trump was always right." Am I getting the gist of where you're going with this? That the American right was always correct? Laughable. What this says is that in 2020 they didn't see the same numbers that they've always seen. Heart disease death counts aren't as high as they've always been. But wow, take a look at covid - those numbers are WAY up. To the observer who wants to say that covid isn't bad and is just the left's fever dream, this is the proof in the pudding. To the intelligent, highly educated left, this says "Covid is the biggest cause of death in 2020. The right is just looking for something else to point at because Trump said so." I believe the article is saying something, but it's not saying the right thing. Covid, in 2020, has been the biggest killer. Trying to identify an alternative cause is just wishful thinking.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
quotemstr 6y ago
It's become sadly common to suppress true research results because gatekeepers are afraid of the wrong people using them. It's gotten so bad that when I see an instance of egregious academic censorship, I think to myself "Yep. That's probably true.". At both society and personal levels, the truth is always the best policy. Suppressing the truth, even for an ostensibly good reason, never ends well. Maybe there's something to the censored article. Maybe there isn't. But whenever I see heavy handed censorship, I have to ask myself, "is there something here?"

gwbas1c 6y ago

[Meta] May I suggest editing the title to "Johns Hopkins published a study saying corona is not a big deal. They then deleted it." I don't see "nbd" that often, and I suspect most Hacker News readers aren't going to realize what "nbd" is either. I opened the article because I thought "nbd" was some medical or scientific term.

URfejk 6y ago
I wanted to but the title would be too long so I couldn't do it.
roywiggins 6y ago
It's not even a study. It's just someone presenting a powerpoint. There's no published paper.

roywiggins 6y ago

This is apparently the result of an "assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s degree program" downloading the CDC data and playing with it. It's not even a study, it's just someone putting together some graphs. It's not clear that they have any experience in interpreting this sort of data, which is probably important. Random economists poking around datasets they don't understand have a habit of coming to weird conclusions that disappear when looked at by subject matter experts. I'm not sure it even counts as a study, where was it published? Is there a preprint somewhere? Is it just a PowerPoint presentation?

URfejk 6y ago
This is true, but that again someone had to approve this before it was put up on their site. That is what any serious institution would do.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  It's a student paper, the author of the piece appears to be a neuroscience undergrad... I'm sure they're a fine student journalist but it's not exactly peer review.
  - TigeriusKirk 6y ago
    Now that you're firmly and repeatedly on record being skeptical of the author, what do you think is wrong about the content?
    - roywiggins 6y ago
      I don't know, there's no paper, it's just powerpoint slides. I have previously poked around NYC-area death statistics and it looks like 1) a massive spike in deaths by any cause that looks like several 9/11s followed by 2) a regression to the usual rate of deaths once COVID was largely brought to heel in the summer months. I can't imagine that the total number of deaths in NYC this year could possibly be the same as in 2019. But I'm not an expert. Ed: glancing over the CDC statistics, when COVID-attributed deaths go up, all-cause mortality goes up, too... by approximately the same amount. If a large proportion of those COVID deaths were mislabeled heart disease deaths, why is that? I made these graphs with the same CDC data: https://imgur.com/a/YejafCE https://imgur.com/a/YejafCE And of course, there's the CDC's own dashboard on excess deaths, which lets you slice this more finely. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

jamra 6y ago

Could the numbers be coming from a drop in influenza? Since we are socially distancing, influenza is probably way down seeing as how it’s less contagious than Covid.

WalterSear 6y ago
They are coming from the fact that this was an article written by an undergrad for their school newspaper.

sleepysysadmin 6y ago

The problem is that coronavirus got political. Not only did politicians get involved which means the probability of lies surrounding covid is 100% certain. That's what politicians do, they open their mouth and lies comes out. The problem is worse, the scientists and advisors also got political. Therefore people must question the veracity of the claims. That doesn't bring us to the current problem, the current problem goes much further. The censorship over all discussion about covid unless it specifically goes along with the politician's story. Then a huge number of tyrannical measures 'for our safety' and it doesn't look quite right. It makes everyone question what's going on. Want to fix the entire situation? Take the politicians out of the equation.

owenstar 6y ago

There should be a peak in US all-cause mortality around April, just like in the EU: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps Is there a similar graph for the US? I couldn't find it on CDC website

Overtonwindow 6y ago

It’s almost like universities have a tacit, political agenda ...

queeerkopf 6y ago

> Since COVID-19 mainly affects the elderly, experts expected an increase in the percentage of deaths in older age groups. However, this increase is not seen from the CDC data. In fact, the percentages of deaths among all age groups remain relatively the same. This directly contradicts the excess mortality data published by CDC itself. [1] From the article it's unclear to me what evidence led to the claims presented. So far the article seems very unconvincing. Seems like John Hopkins has good reasons to take it down. Also bear in mind that the excess mortality we've seen so far is with all the measures to limit the impact of the pandemic. It's fair to assume that excess mortality would be a lot higher without those. Our World In Data has a well explained international overview and analysis. [2][3] [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm [2] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid [3] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-excess-mortality https://ourworldindata.org/covid-excess-mortality

fabiofzero 6y ago

A quick look at the website where this was published should discourage anyone from sharing links from it. I know the HN crew will downvote this because 'murica but whatever.

Arnt 6y ago

Wasn't that the graphing-around that said that people are dying from Corona but the total number of deaths isn't increasing correspondingly, and quite possibly not at all? I found it quite interesting, but it sounded more like a reason to investigate than a result of investigation. For example, some non-Corona treatments are happening in much lower numbers than usually; how "should" that affect the number of deaths from the relevant causes and what numbers are actually observed? It's not sensible to draw conclusions about Corona from the number of other-cause deaths without also looking at the changes to other-cause reasons and treatments.