12 ms·

Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

142 points by aronowb14 6y ago

idoh 6y ago
Excess mortality seems like the best way to track the pandemic because determining whether someone died of covid can be debatable sometimes, but there can be no debate over whether someone died.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I know at least one person who’s having problems exacerbated by lack of mobility. Atrophy in old people can be a big problem. I would not go so far as to support anyone claiming this is why we should be breaking quarantine, but can’t quite support racking them all up as COVID deaths either. Reality is somewhere between the two (but close to “most” than “few”)
  - cma 6y ago
    On the other hand there are other deaths that were reduced, like automobile accidents and just accidents and general.
  - fred_is_fred 6y ago
    I am confused by this. Either this person is only mobile in indoor spaces for some reason or this person lives somewhere they were doing police checkpoints if you leave your house (like Bangalore). I've spent at least 2x more hours outside, walking, riding bikes, hiking, hitting golf balls, etc. There's nothing else to do but be outside. The fact that I don't have to go into the office and no longer can or want to visit breweries and restaurants has been a great boon to my health and Vitamin D intake.
    - briefcomment 6y ago
      Hm, interesting. I’m guessing it’s the lack of socialization more than a lack of movement that’s affecting people’s health.
    - baumandm 6y ago
      Changing routines is hard. Just because people can spend time moving about outside doesn't mean they will. Just like because people can eat healthy food in appropriate amounts doesn't mean we don't have an obesity problem. For example, someone could have used to walk to work, or walk to lunch. Or just spent more time walking about an office building than their home office. Or had a routine of hitting the gym after work, but be unable to find the same motivation to work out at home.
      - inglor_cz 6y ago
        "Or had a routine of hitting the gym after work, but be unable to find the same motivation to work out at home. " I had a routine of hitting the gym between 13.00-15.00, when it is at its emptiest. When the deadlocks came, I bought some rudimentary equipment home, but the experience sucked... Polished hardwood floors are just too slippery. Fortunately, they opened the gyms on Thursday again and I am going back to my previous routine.
      - fred_is_fred 6y ago
        I get the motivation thing but what else is there to do on a Saturday besides go hiking or take the dog on a long walk. We’ve been through this for eight months now and people should be getting outside just for sheer boredom.
    - kgermino 6y ago
      It really depends. My outdoor activity levels are way down. I used to hit 2-3 miles a day just going to work, lunch, the grocery store, meetings, etc which I don’t get anymore. It’s not that I don’t have the Time to make it up, but there’s a lot of days where I only left the house because I had somewhere to go (cold, rainy, busy, etc). There’s a huge difference between “I have to walk to the store because we’re out of bread” and “I have to walk around the block because I need exercise”
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    If you start looking at data more broken down by cause, there are huge surges in (not-confirmed-Covid) “pneumonia”, “stroke”, etc. deaths which very closely follow the distribution in place/time of confirmed Covid deaths. The pattern is very clear and obvious, and not at all what you would expect if the primary cause were just something to do with being in lockdown.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    There are quite a few risk increases associated with general shutdown. This is one with large impact. Another large impact is mental illness, in particular presenting in suicide and substance abuse. On the other side, many other common risks are reduced: workplace injury, other transmissible ailments. If the purpose of the analysis is to determine whether the preventive measure is effective and not overwrought, an excess deaths analysis is a good one because it helps infer what the toll would be in absence of the measure. If the purpose is to attribute cause of death, it’s just a heuristic. But a useful one when other methodologies are (rightly or wrongly) suspect.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Thorrez 6y ago
      >If the purpose of the analysis is to determine whether the preventive measure is effective and not overwrought, an excess deaths analysis is a good one because it helps infer what the toll would be in absence of the measure. How do you know what the toll would be in the absence of the measure? Excess deaths tells us how many deaths are from virus+shutdown. I don't see how we can use this data to find out how many deaths there would be in a virus (no shutdown) scenario, or in a shutdown (no virus) scenario.
    - saiya-jin 6y ago
      > workplace injury, other transmissible ailments. For white collar workforce, it just becomes at-home injury, whatever it is. Transmission generally might not be so greatly reduced either - there are jobs which have to go to work (like my wife who is a doctor) so whole household is exposed, there are schools/kindergardens still open in many countries (so our baby can easily bring covid from it while I haven't been sitting in the office since mid march). Using face masks and washing hands might be helping more with spread, something that was ridiculous and laughed at in western culture still 1 year ago. I was a fan of it even for regular flu as done in south east asia for a long time, but no way you could have done it here.
    - scoopertrooper 6y ago
      > Another large impact is mental illness, in particular presenting in suicide At least one study didn't find an uptick in suicides as a result of the lockdowns. Situation may differ in America because it's run by idiots that cut off state income support and didn't commit to locking down till the situation was under control. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(20)30435-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > I know at least one person who’s having problems exacerbated by lack of mobility. Atrophy in old people can be a big problem. His name is Biden. You can see it on video when he shuffles to the podium.
  - vinni2 6y ago
    What about all the traffic accidents which didn’t happen due to shutdown?
    - medium_burrito 6y ago
      Shhh we don't talk about that! The car industry brings lots of jobs and is nothing but good.
    - YokoZar 6y ago
      > What about all the traffic accidents which didn’t happen due to shutdown? That represents only a few hundred lives, it seems. Deaths per vehicle mile traveled are actually up. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a34240145/2019-2020-traffic-deaths-coronavirus/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a34240145/2019-2020-traffi...
    - ThomPete 6y ago
      domestic violense is up which hurts kids too. Millions will die of starvation around thec world because of extended lockdowns in te west and we could go on.
      - viraptor 6y ago
        > because of extended lockdowns in te west I'd rather phrase it as "because of inadequate social support during lockdown". A few countries paying low support had money to do more. Blaming that just on long lockdown is missing all the other possible solutions. As for the effect on mortality of the lockdowns themselves, it will be interesting to look at Australia in a few months where the infections stayed relatively low, but lockdown lasted months. Especially comparing Vic to NSW.
        ThomPete 6y ago
        I agree but I am talking about the consequences on third world countries of a slowing economy.
        6y ago
  - DanBC 6y ago
    We don't rack them all up as covid deaths. We combine excess mortality with other stats. One of the reasons excess mortality has attracted so much attention is because there are a bunch of people saying that covid just isn't killing many people and we point to the pile of corpses and ask "what happened to them then?"
    - ReptileMan 6y ago
      The main problem is that different people have different definitions what pile of corpses actually is. For me covid is not a big deal and it should have been ignored. And I have came to this conclusion looking at the official data. For a lot of people that are very passionate about masks and lockdowns this is incomprehensible - that I could look at the data and come to different conclusion. That is the point - for me covid isn't killing many people. It is killing tiny amount relative to the global population and it is usually people that were on the way out. Which ones again shows how difficult is to argue with someone when your basic axioms, values and definitions mismatch.
      - DanBC 6y ago
        > and it is usually people that were on the way out. You haven't looked at the data closely enough if you believe this. Covid is killing people an average of 10 years early. Most of these people needed no assistance in their day to day life before they died. This isn't the frail, very elderly, population you think it is.
        ReptileMan 6y ago
        I have seen extremely strong amplification of risk by stuff like obesity, diabetes and the rest of the metabolic syndrome buddies. A lot of the dead were having chronic conditions or were already old.
        gpderetta 6y ago
        Turns out a lot of people have heart conditions or diabetes. Doesn't meant they were going to die.
  - twelve40 6y ago
    Assigning blame for various components of the overall mortality is important for those who can change the policy, but for lil' old me it's very great to see at least one indisputable number (excess mortality - hard to fake the fact of death) that can be trusted to represent the magnitude of what we're dealing with in 2020, and which, yes, includes all deaths caused by (or avoided by) various policies. Everything else quickly becomes a jumbled opinionated mess which depends on how deaths are attributed and quickly loses any objectivity and meaning.
- jariel 6y ago
  The problem is that due to significant and pervasive behaviour changes, other forms of mortality and altered. In some places, there are apparently many fewer people dying from the flu, because, well, we're isolated from one another! Similarly, fewer car accidents. Suicides are probably altered, as well as violence in some cases, in particular domestic violence. People forgoing treatments for any host of disease due to either fear of going to the clinic, or delayed treatments. etc..
  - IronRanger 6y ago
    The other factor little talked about in Europe is aged carers - usually from Eastern Europe and the FSU - rushing to return home to their families in the midst of border closures, lockdowns, and flight cancellations. This lead many residents to die of neglect, or for COVID to sweep easily through many centres if the remaining staff worked whilst symptomatic and took shifts across multiple locations. This is part of the reason why countries in EE and the FSU, as well as those with less strict lockdowns (ie. Sweden), had lower mortality rates than in places like the UK, Spain, Italy, France. It might be worth reconsidering the whole aged care model, and advancing the idea of voluntary euthanasia for the elderly.
    - sam_bristow 6y ago
      What do you mean by that last paragraph? Because on first read it sounds like you're suggesting something horrifying and I hope there's a more generous interpretation I've missed.
      - IronRanger 6y ago
        People should be able to go out on their own terms, instead of deteriorating in an aged care centre. It should be completely legal for those aged 80 and over, for example, to seek to end their life - if they decide they have lived all they want, and don't want to suffer the problems associated with old age. This also allows them to choose their time of death, and for their family to remember them in a state of relatively good health.
- jb775 6y ago
  This data is BS. Firstly, it's nonsense to take "average amount of deaths" over the past few years and extrapolate it to the current year without accounting for population growth changes, and rate of population growth acceleration. Secondly, if you look at the "expected U.S. Death Rate" data[1], it shows that they expected U.S. death rates (per capita) to rapidly accelerate about 7 years ago, but the rate of deaths didn't really begin that acceleration cycle until ~2 years ago: 2017: 858.0 deaths per 100,000 predicted 2018: 868.5 deaths per 100,000 predicted 2019: 878.2 deaths per 100,000 predicted 2020: 888.0 deaths per 100,000 predicted ---------------------------------------- 2017: 731.9 actual deaths per 100,000 [2] 2018: 723.6 actual deaths per 100,000 [3] 2019: 867.8 actual deaths per 100,000 [4] 2020: Could be anywhere between 835-910 depending on the population data and total death numbers you use to calculate ---------------------------------------- Not sure why people aren't dying as fast as they initially thought (probably modern medicine, etc), but that simply means there were more old people on the verge of dying coming into 2020. So even if 2020 shows a per-capita increase in deaths, it's to be expected. [1] - https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/death-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat... [2] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf [3] - https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/death-rate-per-100000/?currentTimeframe=0&selectedRows=%7B%22wrapups%22:%7B%22united-states%22:%7B%7D%7D%7D&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/death-rate-per-100... [4] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
  - Thorrez 6y ago
    Did you look at the "Excess mortality using raw death counts" chart? It's very very clear that 2020 is a huge outlier. Is it possible some of their numbers are a bit off? Sure. But the size of the difference in 2020 dwarfs that.
  - postingpals 6y ago
    I'm more inclined to believe the organisation literally called 'our world in data' as an authority for data research. Your analysis just seems incomplete and I highly doubt they would just leave something out or use bad data. Look at their formulas to get a better idea why.
- URfejk 6y ago
  True. So take a look what this guy found out: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=240767 http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=240767
- oxfordmale 6y ago
  Especially in the second peak, excess mortality also include patients with other underlying health conditions that couldn't, or didn't want to, access health services. In the UK cancer referrals have been at an all time low for example.
- paul_f 6y ago
  To be accurate, we would also need to know the number of deaths attributed to the policies established to prevent COVID deaths and increase hospital capacity. What were the number of excess deaths from other causes - due to fewer doctor visits, fewer diagnostics, fear of going to the hospital, discharging early, etc?
- anoncake 6y ago
  But what are you going to do with that information? It's important to know if someone died of Covid or because of our measures against it. Or even of Covid because of our measures against it (stress weakens the immune system + getting infected anyway).
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  > there can be no debate over whether someone died. Sure, but their deaths can be attributed to lockdowns. And when the vaccine is out, their deaths will probably be attributed to the vaccine. Measuring excess mortality is not going to convince a covid denialist.
  - adewinter 6y ago
    Excess Mortality is a tool used to attribute deaths to _the pandemic_. It is helpful for answering questions like "How well is <country> handling the Pandemic?" and for comparing performance between countries and comparisons over time.
    - Viliam1234 6y ago
      It conflates "deaths caused by pandemic" with "deaths caused by reactions to pandemic" with "deaths caused by random things that accidentally happened during the pandemic". Imagine a parallel universe, where COVID-19 is actually just a flu, but for some reason the oppresive governments execute anyone who says so. In the parallel universe, they also have excess mortality (because of the executions) during 2020. So you cannot use the mere fact of excessive mortality to prove that we do not in fact live in this parallel universe.
      - adewinter 6y ago
        > It conflates "deaths caused by pandemic" with "deaths caused by reactions to pandemic" with "deaths caused by random things that accidentally happened during the pandemic". It is not "conflating". That's the actual point of the exercise here. It's asking, how would things have been had there not been a pandemic? How much impact did the pandemic have on the society, in TOTAL, OVERALL.
centimeter 6y ago
How can we separate out deaths of despair (suicides, overdoses, etc.) brought on by lockdowns?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- TaupeRanger 6y ago
  What do you mean? Those things will still be recorded normally.
  - centimeter 6y ago
    I mean people will point to all-cause excess mortality as a justification to say "Coronavirus killed X million people" even if half of those were lockdown deaths.
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      But those deaths of despair are measurable and also comparable against “normal” levels, and can be easily separated from deaths where the cause is less certain but where symptoms may have aligned with potential covid infection. They track more than the body count. There will be studies of the mental health toll of the pandemic and its response. We won’t just tally those as likely disease.
    - batiudrami 6y ago
      You're trying to see something in the data that isn't there. Even if there was a spike in suicides, it would be a drop in the ocean compared to the excess deaths attributed to physical symptoms of COVID-19. For what it's worth, Melbourne just went through one of the harshest lockdowns (in order to successfully eliminite the COVID-19 in the state), with no spike in suicide rates [1]. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-27/no-spike-in-suicide-rates-in-victoria-during-covid-19-lockdowns/12602060 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-27/no-spike-in-suicide-r...
chadcmulligan 6y ago
In the New Zealand winter less people died than usual by more than 10% in some months - I suppose less flu cases
- tialaramex 6y ago
  Yup. This also was also reported to have provided a weaker than usual signal for the seasonal Flu vaccine in the North. Each hemisphere uses data collected during the winter in the other hemisphere to guess what Influenza variants will be most common in their countries when it's their turn, then it takes several months to turn those guesses into bulk vaccine for immunising the elderly and vulnerable and give them a jab. Sometimes the guess is right on the money and it's extremely effective, other years not so much. Less signal may make this year's winter 2020/21 vaccine less effective.
  - chadcmulligan 6y ago
    > Sometimes the guess is right on the money and it's extremely effective, other years not so much. Oh thats why some years it seems to work, others not, TIL.
- adamjb 6y ago
  Overall mortality tends to decline in recessions, so that could contribute too.
just-juan-post 6y ago
Any purpose to this post other than scaring people? How about you compare things to previous years instead.
- petschge 6y ago
  Excess is by definition in comparison to the average of the last few years.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  Um, the nature of excess death is that it is comparing to previous years. This is a normal statistic we calculate to compare particular events to a long term trend, in this case as you see, this event (a global pandemic) has resulted in huge excess mortality in some countries such as the US.
  - jb775 6y ago
    It's comparing current year death totals to previous year death totals, but isn't taking into account the rate of population growth acceleration, and expected death rate acceleration. This is the definition of misinformation.
    - andreareina 6y ago
      Looking at the raw death counts 2020 is a clear outlier against all other years.
- culopatin 6y ago
  Works well to identify who read any of it and who didn’t.
- sci_prog 6y ago
  Any purpose to this comment other than to show that you haven't even read the article?
qndreoi 6y ago
The data for the bottom chart of US mortalities comes from this source, updated each weekday: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
vitiral 6y ago
I'm very confounded by the "Excess mortality by age group" data in the US. It _appears_ as if the mortality increase is _almost the same for all age groups_, especially at the beginning and after the initial hump. 15-64 yr olds had a 32% higher chance of dying at the hump and stayed above 11% for most of the year. Wow. All the previous findings were that COVID is _extremely unlikely_ to kill you if you are under 50, and pretty unlikely-ish under 70 -- so where are these deaths coming from?
- JPKab 6y ago
  I can't answer your question, but I do happen to know that there has been a large increase in drug overdoses and suicides according to the data I've seen for a specific region I was looking at recently. No idea if it's a national trend.
- melolife 6y ago
  It's proportional. The excess mortality increases by ~10% across the board but the base mortality rate for younger demographics is much lower.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mytechtoday 6y ago
  The excess mortality in the United States doesn't make any sense at all. I followed the link to the article that contained the data regarding the United States, however it was an article that only dealt with the Eurozone and made no mention of "us" "united" "the united states" "America" or "usa" anywhere in the article, so I'm not really sure what evidence supports their claims about the USA?
- JoeData 6y ago
  I made this table: https://imgur.com/PZqKWk2 https://imgur.com/PZqKWk2 It shows the point melolife made, that the percent excess (excess deaths as percent of expected) can be high, but the expected number is fairly low, so the total number of deaths is still relatively small. The data is from November 9, so not up to date.
airstrike 6y ago
Am I the only one who wished they showed cumulative deaths over the course of the year?
- fallingfrog 6y ago
  https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-cumulative-deaths https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-cumulati...
  - airstrike 6y ago
    Thank you
throwitaway1235 6y ago
Would total deaths be a more useful data point? CDC states that 2,839,205 Americans died in the year 2018. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm I would be curious to know how many Americans died in 2020, once the year concludes.
- mkolodny 6y ago
  This graph shows 357,335 excess US deaths from January 5 - October 25: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-cumulative-deaths https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-cumulati... There have been 2,000 - 3,000 known US Covid-19 deaths per day for the past few days. So, devastatingly, I think that number has gone up a lot since October 25. https://www.google.com/search?q=us+covid+numbers https://www.google.com/search?q=us+covid+numbers
- JoeData 6y ago
  The death data that the CDC has received and processed by yesterday, December 4, have a total of 2,893,571 deaths for weeks 1 through 48 (ending November 28). This number is incomplete because of a lag in reporting. The CDC estimates that there are at least 73,000 more deaths in weeks 1 through 48 that haven't yet been received and processed. (Note that this data includes the last 3 days of 2019.) But even with the incomplete count, we have already surpassed 2018 and 2019. It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, but it looks we're on track to have 3.2 million to 3.3 million deaths this year. We won't have a firm grasp on the numbers until March.
mjul 6y ago
A great data source for EU excess deaths is Euromomo. They publish official national mortality statistics weekly from the 26 European countries. Graphs and analysis as well. https://www.euromomo.eu/ https://www.euromomo.eu/
- gpderetta 6y ago
  Yes. I wish they would provide the raw data though.
puranjay 6y ago
January seems like the worst month across countries and years. Given that we didn't have Covid this January, Jan 2021 would be horrifying
- tialaramex 6y ago
  The excess death charts for many countries (the topic of this HN item) do not show any substantial deviation in January 2020. If you're thinking absolute terms rather than excess deaths you're probably looking at Northern Hemisphere countries, so January is Winter, which is associated with higher death rates, but you'll see a different pattern in the South because their Winter is six months offset from ours. Yes this means countries like Australia and New Zealand may well have already experienced the worst of COVID-19 in June-July-August 2020 while the worst in the US or England might be next month, and yes given that they've seen very few deaths while we have thousands every day that's extremely bad news.
patrickhogan1 6y ago
This study does not account for the statistical significance of changes in population structure. This study compares 2020 to data including 2015. The 65-and-older population in the US grew by over a third (34.2% or 13,787,044) during the past decade, and by 3.2% (1,688,924) from 2018 to 2019. The world is aging in all of the countries reported in this study. The peeks in March are interesting.
- wjnc 6y ago
  This is a great point and could be modelled providing that you have access to prospective mortality tables. I fear they are not easily available for most countries and some might be guarded by actuarial societies. For a bias that might balance things out: measuring covid by excess mortality also fails to account for less deaths by traffic and other infectious diseases. I've never come across mortality tables that are broken down to causes of death.
piceas 6y ago
See also for Australia: Measuring excess mortality in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic Provisional deaths data for measuring changes in patterns of mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic and recovery period. Released 25/11/2020 https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-excess-mortality-australia-during-covid-19-pandemic https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-excess-mortality-a...
wjnc 6y ago
A puzzle I'm facing right now professionally is in what way to take Corona into account in actuarial longevity / mortality models. Current thinking is it doesn't impact the long term best estimate of longevity. We will probably resume the ever upward trend in lifespans after we've successfully managed this storm. But what to think of the 1-in-200 year shock scenario? Do we expect another pandemic in the next 200 years (:: Yes, return frequency of pandemics is about 20-30 years)? Is this the biggest we can face or are there even bigger shocks (Black Death-like scenarios)? How to account for differences in policy response (these models use data from many countries as a baseline) and expected future responses (will we learn something from this crisis). And then the kicker: How to model this rigourously enough to get your model past supervisors.
- rufus_foreman 6y ago
  >> We will probably resume the ever upward trend in lifespans after we've successfully managed this storm US life expectancy was lower in 2019 than it was in 2013. Pretty unprecedented outside of things like the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's probably a bigger issue than the pandemic long term.
  - pashamur 6y ago
    There's large variance there depending on demographic factors & income quintiles. Life expectancy is going up for some, while down for others: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44846.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44846.pdf "Their most relevant finding for Social Security reform is that life expectancy increased continuously with income and that, according to them, “[t]here was no dividing line above or below which higher income was not associated with higher life expectancy.” At increasingly higher levels of income, they report that an increase in income of a given dollar amount produced positive but smaller gains in life expectancy. "
onecommentman 6y ago
I assume someone posted this link in the discussion and it has faded, but the US CDC has a fine webpage addressing excess deaths in the US, with time series data for the last 3 years and an ability to look at individual State-level info https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm I’m not a fan of the automatic rescaling and truncating of the y-axis on charts by the original link. It is associated with a “lying with statistics” attack on the meaning of the graph. The CDC graphs don’t suffer from that problem.

142 points by aronowb14 6y ago

idoh 6y ago

Excess mortality seems like the best way to track the pandemic because determining whether someone died of covid can be debatable sometimes, but there can be no debate over whether someone died.

hinkley 6y ago
I know at least one person who’s having problems exacerbated by lack of mobility. Atrophy in old people can be a big problem. I would not go so far as to support anyone claiming this is why we should be breaking quarantine, but can’t quite support racking them all up as COVID deaths either. Reality is somewhere between the two (but close to “most” than “few”)
- cma 6y ago
  On the other hand there are other deaths that were reduced, like automobile accidents and just accidents and general.
- fred_is_fred 6y ago
  I am confused by this. Either this person is only mobile in indoor spaces for some reason or this person lives somewhere they were doing police checkpoints if you leave your house (like Bangalore). I've spent at least 2x more hours outside, walking, riding bikes, hiking, hitting golf balls, etc. There's nothing else to do but be outside. The fact that I don't have to go into the office and no longer can or want to visit breweries and restaurants has been a great boon to my health and Vitamin D intake.
  - briefcomment 6y ago
    Hm, interesting. I’m guessing it’s the lack of socialization more than a lack of movement that’s affecting people’s health.
  - baumandm 6y ago
    Changing routines is hard. Just because people can spend time moving about outside doesn't mean they will. Just like because people can eat healthy food in appropriate amounts doesn't mean we don't have an obesity problem. For example, someone could have used to walk to work, or walk to lunch. Or just spent more time walking about an office building than their home office. Or had a routine of hitting the gym after work, but be unable to find the same motivation to work out at home.
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      "Or had a routine of hitting the gym after work, but be unable to find the same motivation to work out at home. " I had a routine of hitting the gym between 13.00-15.00, when it is at its emptiest. When the deadlocks came, I bought some rudimentary equipment home, but the experience sucked... Polished hardwood floors are just too slippery. Fortunately, they opened the gyms on Thursday again and I am going back to my previous routine.
    - fred_is_fred 6y ago
      I get the motivation thing but what else is there to do on a Saturday besides go hiking or take the dog on a long walk. We’ve been through this for eight months now and people should be getting outside just for sheer boredom.
  - kgermino 6y ago
    It really depends. My outdoor activity levels are way down. I used to hit 2-3 miles a day just going to work, lunch, the grocery store, meetings, etc which I don’t get anymore. It’s not that I don’t have the Time to make it up, but there’s a lot of days where I only left the house because I had somewhere to go (cold, rainy, busy, etc). There’s a huge difference between “I have to walk to the store because we’re out of bread” and “I have to walk around the block because I need exercise”
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- jacobolus 6y ago
  If you start looking at data more broken down by cause, there are huge surges in (not-confirmed-Covid) “pneumonia”, “stroke”, etc. deaths which very closely follow the distribution in place/time of confirmed Covid deaths. The pattern is very clear and obvious, and not at all what you would expect if the primary cause were just something to do with being in lockdown.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  There are quite a few risk increases associated with general shutdown. This is one with large impact. Another large impact is mental illness, in particular presenting in suicide and substance abuse. On the other side, many other common risks are reduced: workplace injury, other transmissible ailments. If the purpose of the analysis is to determine whether the preventive measure is effective and not overwrought, an excess deaths analysis is a good one because it helps infer what the toll would be in absence of the measure. If the purpose is to attribute cause of death, it’s just a heuristic. But a useful one when other methodologies are (rightly or wrongly) suspect.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - Thorrez 6y ago
    >If the purpose of the analysis is to determine whether the preventive measure is effective and not overwrought, an excess deaths analysis is a good one because it helps infer what the toll would be in absence of the measure. How do you know what the toll would be in the absence of the measure? Excess deaths tells us how many deaths are from virus+shutdown. I don't see how we can use this data to find out how many deaths there would be in a virus (no shutdown) scenario, or in a shutdown (no virus) scenario.
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    > workplace injury, other transmissible ailments. For white collar workforce, it just becomes at-home injury, whatever it is. Transmission generally might not be so greatly reduced either - there are jobs which have to go to work (like my wife who is a doctor) so whole household is exposed, there are schools/kindergardens still open in many countries (so our baby can easily bring covid from it while I haven't been sitting in the office since mid march). Using face masks and washing hands might be helping more with spread, something that was ridiculous and laughed at in western culture still 1 year ago. I was a fan of it even for regular flu as done in south east asia for a long time, but no way you could have done it here.
  - scoopertrooper 6y ago
    > Another large impact is mental illness, in particular presenting in suicide At least one study didn't find an uptick in suicides as a result of the lockdowns. Situation may differ in America because it's run by idiots that cut off state income support and didn't commit to locking down till the situation was under control. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(20)30435-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > I know at least one person who’s having problems exacerbated by lack of mobility. Atrophy in old people can be a big problem. His name is Biden. You can see it on video when he shuffles to the podium.
- vinni2 6y ago
  What about all the traffic accidents which didn’t happen due to shutdown?
  - medium_burrito 6y ago
    Shhh we don't talk about that! The car industry brings lots of jobs and is nothing but good.
  - YokoZar 6y ago
    > What about all the traffic accidents which didn’t happen due to shutdown? That represents only a few hundred lives, it seems. Deaths per vehicle mile traveled are actually up. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a34240145/2019-2020-traffic-deaths-coronavirus/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a34240145/2019-2020-traffi...
  - ThomPete 6y ago
    domestic violense is up which hurts kids too. Millions will die of starvation around thec world because of extended lockdowns in te west and we could go on.
    - viraptor 6y ago
      > because of extended lockdowns in te west I'd rather phrase it as "because of inadequate social support during lockdown". A few countries paying low support had money to do more. Blaming that just on long lockdown is missing all the other possible solutions. As for the effect on mortality of the lockdowns themselves, it will be interesting to look at Australia in a few months where the infections stayed relatively low, but lockdown lasted months. Especially comparing Vic to NSW.
      - ThomPete 6y ago
        I agree but I am talking about the consequences on third world countries of a slowing economy.
        6y ago
- DanBC 6y ago
  We don't rack them all up as covid deaths. We combine excess mortality with other stats. One of the reasons excess mortality has attracted so much attention is because there are a bunch of people saying that covid just isn't killing many people and we point to the pile of corpses and ask "what happened to them then?"
  - ReptileMan 6y ago
    The main problem is that different people have different definitions what pile of corpses actually is. For me covid is not a big deal and it should have been ignored. And I have came to this conclusion looking at the official data. For a lot of people that are very passionate about masks and lockdowns this is incomprehensible - that I could look at the data and come to different conclusion. That is the point - for me covid isn't killing many people. It is killing tiny amount relative to the global population and it is usually people that were on the way out. Which ones again shows how difficult is to argue with someone when your basic axioms, values and definitions mismatch.
    - DanBC 6y ago
      > and it is usually people that were on the way out. You haven't looked at the data closely enough if you believe this. Covid is killing people an average of 10 years early. Most of these people needed no assistance in their day to day life before they died. This isn't the frail, very elderly, population you think it is.
      - ReptileMan 6y ago
        I have seen extremely strong amplification of risk by stuff like obesity, diabetes and the rest of the metabolic syndrome buddies. A lot of the dead were having chronic conditions or were already old.
        gpderetta 6y ago
        Turns out a lot of people have heart conditions or diabetes. Doesn't meant they were going to die.
- twelve40 6y ago
  Assigning blame for various components of the overall mortality is important for those who can change the policy, but for lil' old me it's very great to see at least one indisputable number (excess mortality - hard to fake the fact of death) that can be trusted to represent the magnitude of what we're dealing with in 2020, and which, yes, includes all deaths caused by (or avoided by) various policies. Everything else quickly becomes a jumbled opinionated mess which depends on how deaths are attributed and quickly loses any objectivity and meaning.
jariel 6y ago
The problem is that due to significant and pervasive behaviour changes, other forms of mortality and altered. In some places, there are apparently many fewer people dying from the flu, because, well, we're isolated from one another! Similarly, fewer car accidents. Suicides are probably altered, as well as violence in some cases, in particular domestic violence. People forgoing treatments for any host of disease due to either fear of going to the clinic, or delayed treatments. etc..
- IronRanger 6y ago
  The other factor little talked about in Europe is aged carers - usually from Eastern Europe and the FSU - rushing to return home to their families in the midst of border closures, lockdowns, and flight cancellations. This lead many residents to die of neglect, or for COVID to sweep easily through many centres if the remaining staff worked whilst symptomatic and took shifts across multiple locations. This is part of the reason why countries in EE and the FSU, as well as those with less strict lockdowns (ie. Sweden), had lower mortality rates than in places like the UK, Spain, Italy, France. It might be worth reconsidering the whole aged care model, and advancing the idea of voluntary euthanasia for the elderly.
  - sam_bristow 6y ago
    What do you mean by that last paragraph? Because on first read it sounds like you're suggesting something horrifying and I hope there's a more generous interpretation I've missed.
    - IronRanger 6y ago
      People should be able to go out on their own terms, instead of deteriorating in an aged care centre. It should be completely legal for those aged 80 and over, for example, to seek to end their life - if they decide they have lived all they want, and don't want to suffer the problems associated with old age. This also allows them to choose their time of death, and for their family to remember them in a state of relatively good health.
jb775 6y ago
This data is BS. Firstly, it's nonsense to take "average amount of deaths" over the past few years and extrapolate it to the current year without accounting for population growth changes, and rate of population growth acceleration. Secondly, if you look at the "expected U.S. Death Rate" data[1], it shows that they expected U.S. death rates (per capita) to rapidly accelerate about 7 years ago, but the rate of deaths didn't really begin that acceleration cycle until ~2 years ago: 2017: 858.0 deaths per 100,000 predicted 2018: 868.5 deaths per 100,000 predicted 2019: 878.2 deaths per 100,000 predicted 2020: 888.0 deaths per 100,000 predicted ---------------------------------------- 2017: 731.9 actual deaths per 100,000 [2] 2018: 723.6 actual deaths per 100,000 [3] 2019: 867.8 actual deaths per 100,000 [4] 2020: Could be anywhere between 835-910 depending on the population data and total death numbers you use to calculate ---------------------------------------- Not sure why people aren't dying as fast as they initially thought (probably modern medicine, etc), but that simply means there were more old people on the verge of dying coming into 2020. So even if 2020 shows a per-capita increase in deaths, it's to be expected. [1] - https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/death-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat... [2] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf [3] - https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/death-rate-per-100000/?currentTimeframe=0&selectedRows=%7B%22wrapups%22:%7B%22united-states%22:%7B%7D%7D%7D&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/death-rate-per-100... [4] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
- Thorrez 6y ago
  Did you look at the "Excess mortality using raw death counts" chart? It's very very clear that 2020 is a huge outlier. Is it possible some of their numbers are a bit off? Sure. But the size of the difference in 2020 dwarfs that.
- postingpals 6y ago
  I'm more inclined to believe the organisation literally called 'our world in data' as an authority for data research. Your analysis just seems incomplete and I highly doubt they would just leave something out or use bad data. Look at their formulas to get a better idea why.
URfejk 6y ago
True. So take a look what this guy found out: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=240767 http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=240767
oxfordmale 6y ago
Especially in the second peak, excess mortality also include patients with other underlying health conditions that couldn't, or didn't want to, access health services. In the UK cancer referrals have been at an all time low for example.
paul_f 6y ago
To be accurate, we would also need to know the number of deaths attributed to the policies established to prevent COVID deaths and increase hospital capacity. What were the number of excess deaths from other causes - due to fewer doctor visits, fewer diagnostics, fear of going to the hospital, discharging early, etc?
anoncake 6y ago
But what are you going to do with that information? It's important to know if someone died of Covid or because of our measures against it. Or even of Covid because of our measures against it (stress weakens the immune system + getting infected anyway).
Viliam1234 6y ago
> there can be no debate over whether someone died. Sure, but their deaths can be attributed to lockdowns. And when the vaccine is out, their deaths will probably be attributed to the vaccine. Measuring excess mortality is not going to convince a covid denialist.
- adewinter 6y ago
  Excess Mortality is a tool used to attribute deaths to _the pandemic_. It is helpful for answering questions like "How well is <country> handling the Pandemic?" and for comparing performance between countries and comparisons over time.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    It conflates "deaths caused by pandemic" with "deaths caused by reactions to pandemic" with "deaths caused by random things that accidentally happened during the pandemic". Imagine a parallel universe, where COVID-19 is actually just a flu, but for some reason the oppresive governments execute anyone who says so. In the parallel universe, they also have excess mortality (because of the executions) during 2020. So you cannot use the mere fact of excessive mortality to prove that we do not in fact live in this parallel universe.
    - adewinter 6y ago
      > It conflates "deaths caused by pandemic" with "deaths caused by reactions to pandemic" with "deaths caused by random things that accidentally happened during the pandemic". It is not "conflating". That's the actual point of the exercise here. It's asking, how would things have been had there not been a pandemic? How much impact did the pandemic have on the society, in TOTAL, OVERALL.

centimeter 6y ago

How can we separate out deaths of despair (suicides, overdoses, etc.) brought on by lockdowns?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TaupeRanger 6y ago
What do you mean? Those things will still be recorded normally.
- centimeter 6y ago
  I mean people will point to all-cause excess mortality as a justification to say "Coronavirus killed X million people" even if half of those were lockdown deaths.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    But those deaths of despair are measurable and also comparable against “normal” levels, and can be easily separated from deaths where the cause is less certain but where symptoms may have aligned with potential covid infection. They track more than the body count. There will be studies of the mental health toll of the pandemic and its response. We won’t just tally those as likely disease.
  - batiudrami 6y ago
    You're trying to see something in the data that isn't there. Even if there was a spike in suicides, it would be a drop in the ocean compared to the excess deaths attributed to physical symptoms of COVID-19. For what it's worth, Melbourne just went through one of the harshest lockdowns (in order to successfully eliminite the COVID-19 in the state), with no spike in suicide rates [1]. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-27/no-spike-in-suicide-rates-in-victoria-during-covid-19-lockdowns/12602060 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-27/no-spike-in-suicide-r...

chadcmulligan 6y ago

In the New Zealand winter less people died than usual by more than 10% in some months - I suppose less flu cases

tialaramex 6y ago
Yup. This also was also reported to have provided a weaker than usual signal for the seasonal Flu vaccine in the North. Each hemisphere uses data collected during the winter in the other hemisphere to guess what Influenza variants will be most common in their countries when it's their turn, then it takes several months to turn those guesses into bulk vaccine for immunising the elderly and vulnerable and give them a jab. Sometimes the guess is right on the money and it's extremely effective, other years not so much. Less signal may make this year's winter 2020/21 vaccine less effective.
- chadcmulligan 6y ago
  > Sometimes the guess is right on the money and it's extremely effective, other years not so much. Oh thats why some years it seems to work, others not, TIL.
adamjb 6y ago
Overall mortality tends to decline in recessions, so that could contribute too.

just-juan-post 6y ago

Any purpose to this post other than scaring people? How about you compare things to previous years instead.

petschge 6y ago
Excess is by definition in comparison to the average of the last few years.
tialaramex 6y ago
Um, the nature of excess death is that it is comparing to previous years. This is a normal statistic we calculate to compare particular events to a long term trend, in this case as you see, this event (a global pandemic) has resulted in huge excess mortality in some countries such as the US.
- jb775 6y ago
  It's comparing current year death totals to previous year death totals, but isn't taking into account the rate of population growth acceleration, and expected death rate acceleration. This is the definition of misinformation.
  - andreareina 6y ago
    Looking at the raw death counts 2020 is a clear outlier against all other years.
culopatin 6y ago
Works well to identify who read any of it and who didn’t.
sci_prog 6y ago
Any purpose to this comment other than to show that you haven't even read the article?

qndreoi 6y ago

The data for the bottom chart of US mortalities comes from this source, updated each weekday: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

vitiral 6y ago

I'm very confounded by the "Excess mortality by age group" data in the US. It _appears_ as if the mortality increase is _almost the same for all age groups_, especially at the beginning and after the initial hump. 15-64 yr olds had a 32% higher chance of dying at the hump and stayed above 11% for most of the year. Wow. All the previous findings were that COVID is _extremely unlikely_ to kill you if you are under 50, and pretty unlikely-ish under 70 -- so where are these deaths coming from?

JPKab 6y ago
I can't answer your question, but I do happen to know that there has been a large increase in drug overdoses and suicides according to the data I've seen for a specific region I was looking at recently. No idea if it's a national trend.
melolife 6y ago
It's proportional. The excess mortality increases by ~10% across the board but the base mortality rate for younger demographics is much lower.
deleted 6y ago
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mytechtoday 6y ago
The excess mortality in the United States doesn't make any sense at all. I followed the link to the article that contained the data regarding the United States, however it was an article that only dealt with the Eurozone and made no mention of "us" "united" "the united states" "America" or "usa" anywhere in the article, so I'm not really sure what evidence supports their claims about the USA?
JoeData 6y ago
I made this table: https://imgur.com/PZqKWk2 https://imgur.com/PZqKWk2 It shows the point melolife made, that the percent excess (excess deaths as percent of expected) can be high, but the expected number is fairly low, so the total number of deaths is still relatively small. The data is from November 9, so not up to date.

airstrike 6y ago

Am I the only one who wished they showed cumulative deaths over the course of the year?

fallingfrog 6y ago
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-cumulative-deaths https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-cumulati...
- airstrike 6y ago
  Thank you

throwitaway1235 6y ago

Would total deaths be a more useful data point? CDC states that 2,839,205 Americans died in the year 2018. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm I would be curious to know how many Americans died in 2020, once the year concludes.

mkolodny 6y ago
This graph shows 357,335 excess US deaths from January 5 - October 25: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-cumulative-deaths https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-cumulati... There have been 2,000 - 3,000 known US Covid-19 deaths per day for the past few days. So, devastatingly, I think that number has gone up a lot since October 25. https://www.google.com/search?q=us+covid+numbers https://www.google.com/search?q=us+covid+numbers
JoeData 6y ago
The death data that the CDC has received and processed by yesterday, December 4, have a total of 2,893,571 deaths for weeks 1 through 48 (ending November 28). This number is incomplete because of a lag in reporting. The CDC estimates that there are at least 73,000 more deaths in weeks 1 through 48 that haven't yet been received and processed. (Note that this data includes the last 3 days of 2019.) But even with the incomplete count, we have already surpassed 2018 and 2019. It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, but it looks we're on track to have 3.2 million to 3.3 million deaths this year. We won't have a firm grasp on the numbers until March.

mjul 6y ago

A great data source for EU excess deaths is Euromomo. They publish official national mortality statistics weekly from the 26 European countries. Graphs and analysis as well. https://www.euromomo.eu/ https://www.euromomo.eu/

gpderetta 6y ago
Yes. I wish they would provide the raw data though.

puranjay 6y ago

January seems like the worst month across countries and years. Given that we didn't have Covid this January, Jan 2021 would be horrifying

tialaramex 6y ago
The excess death charts for many countries (the topic of this HN item) do not show any substantial deviation in January 2020. If you're thinking absolute terms rather than excess deaths you're probably looking at Northern Hemisphere countries, so January is Winter, which is associated with higher death rates, but you'll see a different pattern in the South because their Winter is six months offset from ours. Yes this means countries like Australia and New Zealand may well have already experienced the worst of COVID-19 in June-July-August 2020 while the worst in the US or England might be next month, and yes given that they've seen very few deaths while we have thousands every day that's extremely bad news.

patrickhogan1 6y ago

This study does not account for the statistical significance of changes in population structure. This study compares 2020 to data including 2015. The 65-and-older population in the US grew by over a third (34.2% or 13,787,044) during the past decade, and by 3.2% (1,688,924) from 2018 to 2019. The world is aging in all of the countries reported in this study. The peeks in March are interesting.

wjnc 6y ago
This is a great point and could be modelled providing that you have access to prospective mortality tables. I fear they are not easily available for most countries and some might be guarded by actuarial societies. For a bias that might balance things out: measuring covid by excess mortality also fails to account for less deaths by traffic and other infectious diseases. I've never come across mortality tables that are broken down to causes of death.

piceas 6y ago

See also for Australia: Measuring excess mortality in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic Provisional deaths data for measuring changes in patterns of mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic and recovery period. Released 25/11/2020 https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-excess-mortality-australia-during-covid-19-pandemic https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-excess-mortality-a...

wjnc 6y ago

A puzzle I'm facing right now professionally is in what way to take Corona into account in actuarial longevity / mortality models. Current thinking is it doesn't impact the long term best estimate of longevity. We will probably resume the ever upward trend in lifespans after we've successfully managed this storm. But what to think of the 1-in-200 year shock scenario? Do we expect another pandemic in the next 200 years (:: Yes, return frequency of pandemics is about 20-30 years)? Is this the biggest we can face or are there even bigger shocks (Black Death-like scenarios)? How to account for differences in policy response (these models use data from many countries as a baseline) and expected future responses (will we learn something from this crisis). And then the kicker: How to model this rigourously enough to get your model past supervisors.

rufus_foreman 6y ago
>> We will probably resume the ever upward trend in lifespans after we've successfully managed this storm US life expectancy was lower in 2019 than it was in 2013. Pretty unprecedented outside of things like the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's probably a bigger issue than the pandemic long term.
- pashamur 6y ago
  There's large variance there depending on demographic factors & income quintiles. Life expectancy is going up for some, while down for others: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44846.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44846.pdf "Their most relevant finding for Social Security reform is that life expectancy increased continuously with income and that, according to them, “[t]here was no dividing line above or below which higher income was not associated with higher life expectancy.” At increasingly higher levels of income, they report that an increase in income of a given dollar amount produced positive but smaller gains in life expectancy. "

onecommentman 6y ago

I assume someone posted this link in the discussion and it has faded, but the US CDC has a fine webpage addressing excess deaths in the US, with time series data for the last 3 years and an ability to look at individual State-level info https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm I’m not a fan of the automatic rescaling and truncating of the y-axis on charts by the original link. It is associated with a “lying with statistics” attack on the meaning of the graph. The CDC graphs don’t suffer from that problem.