8 ms·

US deaths in 2020 top 3M, by far most ever counted

96 points by tempsy 6y ago

SlipperySlope 6y ago
This statistic puts an end to the debate about COVID death reporting. Some said that COVID deaths inflated due to federal subsidies to hospitals with COVID patients. Some said that deaths would have occurred anyway due to the serious medical conditions - co-morbidities - that patients had. With this statistic, the explanation for the huge annual increase can only be COVID.
- macintux 6y ago
  You're far more optimistic than I am. People can find many ways to mold statistics to fit their beliefs (or simply reject the numbers as a deep state conspiracy). This debate will never be over.
  - chii 6y ago
    it's not a debate if they refuse to look at evidence in a scientific and neutral light. Instead, it's a propaganda fight.
    - brlewis 6y ago
      It won't be refusing to look; it will be asserting speculation as fact, e.g. saying that the excess deaths are from increased domestic abuse and suicide because of the lockdown. EDIT: This is not in reference to comments here on HN. I wrote this before seeing any comments referencing those other causes of death, and those comments here on HN are not presenting speculation as fact.
- codysc 6y ago
  While I agree with your points about the clear indication of covid deaths, unfortunately this will have no impact on the debate. Facts aren't super relevant anymore.
  - sangli 6y ago
    Heh! Facts are always relevant when you are debating in good faith. People who find facts not supporting their beliefs argue dishonesty that doesn't mean facts are not relevant.
  - ultrarunner 6y ago
    > Facts aren't super relevant anymore. This is so interesting to me. Facts are still important to those seeking truth. Sure, there are a lot of people seeking reassurance ahead of truth, but there are also simply a lot of people. Given that people now have more ability to make their opinions widely known, I suspect that truth and facts are just as relevant as ever, but that loud noises will be made by those who won't be doing anything relevant about it either way. Our ability to judge the relative value of messages is proportional to our ability to reason about the sheer number of people with things to say. I think that wrapping one's mind around the enormity of 330 million people may be valuable towards honing in on not only what messages are important, but what movements simply aren't.
    - macintux 6y ago
      > I suspect that truth and facts are just as relevant as ever The last two elections have broken my faith in that.
      - ultrarunner 6y ago
        Again, lots of people produce lots of opinions. If I'm understanding you correctly, the meme that "the deplorables" all think alike (and are thus wrong) doesn't have much merit after more than a cursory glance.
    - pdkl95 6y ago
      > Facts are still important to those seeking truth. What about the people that don't want to seek truth? > The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-...
- ravenstine 6y ago
  You're speaking as if this article gives us certainty that the 400,000 extra deaths this year, compared to last year, are due to COVID. The article makes no such claim. Maybe that's not what you meant, though, because clearly there are things like drug overdoses, suicides, domestic violence, etc., that can also explain a lot of it as well. Tens of thousands of people die of fentanyl overdoses each year, and the number was growing up to this point, so it's not farfetched to consider that the COVID restrictions have resulted in more people taking addictive drugs or killing themselves out of desperation.
  - macintux 6y ago
    > The article makes no such claim. The article claims 318k COVID deaths. > COVID-19 has killed more than 318,000 Americans and counting. Before it came along, there was reason to be hopeful about U.S. death trends. The numbers also don't highlight the number of unnecessary deaths and suffering because hospitals are overwhelmed. (Edited to include the specific statement I'm refuting.)
  - davycro 6y ago
    I’ve worked in four emergency departments in three states this year. All of them have been overwhelmed by patients with covid, and not patients with overdoses, suicides, or domestic violence. Granted the incidence of those non-covid pathologies are likely higher this year, but they are no-way elevated at the scale of covid-19. I haven’t seen, or heard from any colleagues, hospitals brimming with suicides and overdoses to the point where they are filling an entire icu with those patients, or having so many domestic violence cases that they have to shut down operating rooms and convert them into icu beds.
    - karmelapple 6y ago
      Thank you for helping in all these emergency rooms, and I’m sorry that some people are downplaying the virus’s effects on mortality in the USA in 2020.
      - CryptoPunk 6y ago
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  There were other factors that differed in 2020 compared to other years, like the effects of the lockdowns: mass-bankrupties [1], social isolation for the elderly [2], an increase in drug-overdoses, a decline in access to quality-of-life enhancing services, etc. Isolation in general is extremely deadly. [3] My guess is that the effects of COVID on the US's 2020 mortality rate were much greater than the effects of the lockdown, but that is just a guess, not a scientifically validated conclusion. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/small-businesses-are-dying-by-the-thousands--and-no-one-is-tracking-the-carnage/2020/08/11/660f9f52-dbda-11ea-b4f1-25b762cdbbf4_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/sm... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hidden-covid-19-health-crisis-elderly-people-are-dying-isolation-n1244853 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hidden-covid-19-health-... [3] https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/dangers-of-loneliness-social-isolation-is-deadlier-than-obesity.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/dangers-of-loneliness-s...
- HuwytNashi_004 6y ago
  The devil's advocate could point out how trivial it would be to fudge these numbers. "Government releases data showing government is benevolent. Trust government." Better yet, he might point out how absurd it is that we need to wait this long to identify a potentially statistically significant increase in deaths... during one of the worst pandemics in recorded history.
  - macintux 6y ago
    > Government releases data showing government is benevolent. Trust government. Don't these numbers show government is incompetent? And the overall increase has been pretty clear for a while now.
- matz1 6y ago
  >With this statistic, the explanation for the huge annual increase can only be COVID. Do you really think that the lockdown and its effect (the bankruptcy, unemployment, reduced social activity, delayed treatment of other illness, etc) could not cause increase in death ?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - fairity 6y ago
    Not sure why you're downvoted. Your question is valid. That said, I've yet to find solid evidence that supports a substantial rise in suicide rates. The only source I found suggested the opposite: https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352 https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352
    - yibg 6y ago
      I didn't downvote, but it's probably because every time talk about covid related deaths comes up, there is someone that tries to downplay it, and almost always with the same line of reasoning. Problem is it ignores all the actual reports of covid deaths, overwhelmed hospitals and lack of stats on significant increases (or at least significant enough to account for the extra deaths) from other causes. The implication is almost always something along the lines of Covid is just a flu, it's not that deadly and we shouldn't have taken the measures we have.
      - 93po 6y ago
        I see reports that hospital levels are fine, it's just that their dedicated covid areas are filling up. Or that nursing shortages are more to do with layoffs or hiring freezes by penny pinching executives. And reporting that covid deaths are vastly inflated from perverse incentives or political agendas or mandatory rules of which the nuance is lost in reporting. Not saying any of this is true. Just saying I'm not exactly watching Alex Jones or Fox News and this is still the stuff I hear, and just because you hear a report about something doesn't mean it's the arbiter of truth and everyone else is wrong.
- just-juan-post 6y ago
  Murder + Suicide counted as Covid 19 https://www.skyhinews.com/news/coroner-state-included-a-murder-suicide-in-grands-covid-deaths/ https://www.skyhinews.com/news/coroner-state-included-a-murd... Man with 0.55 blood alcohol level (not a typo) counted as a Covid death https://durangoherald.com/articles/324539 https://durangoherald.com/articles/324539
FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513489
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  These are the same. Your link brings me back here.
PointyFluff 6y ago
1% of the entire US population. Fucking thanks, Magas.
- pluc 6y ago
  Less of you means less of them too
- mcculley 6y ago
  > But the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15%, and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted. Not all of that 1% are attributed to COVID. It is still terrible, but one cannot blame the Trumpers for all of the deaths.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
enoughBadMath 6y ago
Every year the flu kills the old, obese, and sick. This is no different but approx 4x more deadly. We will see in future years some of the lowest death counts.
supernova87a 6y ago
Human beings (or maybe America right now) are good, or used to be good, at attacking threats that are: -- large and concentrated -- sudden -- unusual, uncommon -- gruesome Not so good at threats that are: -- everyday, slow -- small, but distributed -- mundane, familiar I guess COVID found our Achilles heel.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Or just anything that is not an equal opportunity killer. Everyone can be killed by a terrorist. Plenty of people believe COVID is no threat to them.
  - AnHonestComment 6y ago
    And they’d be right: Someone over 70 is 270x as likely to die of COVID as someone under 50. For anyone under 50 without co-morbidity, then this is just a yearly flu — and destroying your economic future over the flu doesn’t make sense. Having a blanket policy that ignores those differences is unrealistic. IFR numbers are from the CDC’s best estimate: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
    - doctor_eval 6y ago
      So... now we are having a conversation about why one group of 400K people is more worthy of saving than another?
      - throwaway201103 6y ago
        I think, clearly, that there is a debate to be had about the value of lives that are nearly at an end no matter what, and lives that are just hitting their prime.
        doctor_eval 6y ago
        Someone who is 60 or even 70 is not necessarily “nearly at an end”. Just ask either of your presidents.
throwaway201103 6y ago
Some of this is COVID, no doubt. Most of those deaths are people in their last decade (if not last few years) of life regardless. We had a baby boom in the 1950s. So we should be too surprised to have a death boom starting right about now.
onecommentman 6y ago
A QALY-based analysis would provide a different historical perspective. https://www.healthguideinfo.com/health-informatics/p6185/ https://www.healthguideinfo.com/health-informatics/p6185/ I haven’t seen a QALY-based analysis of the fatality data. Odd, because our State is reporting underlying condition stats and age (by decade) and gender of death daily. Pretty easy to take expected years of life remaining, and quality of life given age and underlying conditions and estimate and come up with an estimate to first order of the “quality life years” lost due to COVID. No one seems to be providing such a QALY estimate. So, let’s do a quick one. For 1917, the comparison year, let’s assume excess deaths were from combat and the Spanish Flu. Combat skews young. So, say, 50 quality years per death. I don’t see any age-specific bias or bias towards underlying conditions one way or another in Spanish Flu cases given this information. And a lot of cases of healthy adults dying, e.g. Australian miners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu So let’s say 30 quality years lost per death. COVID skews old. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi... The median age of COVID death in my county has been in the late 70s Life expectancy tables for US suggest ten years of life remaining for folks in their late 70s. I’ve seen statistics that find degraded quality of life in the last 3 or 4 years of life. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-09-healthy-lifestyle-age-shortens-end-of-life.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-09-healthy-lifestyle-age... Even without underlying conditions, that puts quality life years lost at 8. Underlying conditions predisposing to COVID death will only make it look worse, driving the 8 down to 7 or 6. So, for 1917, 50 years lost in combat combined with 30 quality years lost to the “Spanish Flu”...IDK, let’s say 40 years lost per death. For 2020, COVID excess deaths...6-8 quality years lost. Even after quibbling with numbers, the quality years of life lost are a factor of 5 higher in 1917 as compared to 2020. Based on this, admittedly rough, “analysis”. (You get what you pay for.) I really would like to see a formal QALY analysis of COVID, instead of the ones that many people have already done in their heads.
- fairity 6y ago
  Apparently if you don't assign infinite value to every person's life, you get downvoted here.
tinalumfoil 6y ago
Wouldn't we generally expect any given year is the deadliest year on record? If we assume (1) the population strictly increases year on year and (2) deaths are proportional to population in a given year, then it would be true. Weaken these assumptions and it should still be true for the most part.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  The key part is the "by far." The article addresses this in the first few paragraphs: > U.S. deaths increase most years, so some annual rise in fatalities is expected. But the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15%, and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted. > That would mark the largest single-year percentage leap since 1918, when tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died in World War I and hundreds of thousands of Americans died in a flu pandemic. Deaths rose 46% that year, compared with 1917.
  - khuey 6y ago
    And "Deaths usually rise by about 20,000 to 50,000 each year, mainly due to the nation’s aging, and growing, population."
  - tinalumfoil 6y ago
    It walks back the significance of the title a bit, but that's different than addressing it. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I would expect far larger number of souls to die from one year to the next even if nothing significant occurred.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- twblalock 6y ago
  3.2 million (the number from the article) is is 400k more than last year. The latest Covid toll in the NYT tracker is 322,839, and all of those deaths were in 2020. So, there is a gap of 77-78k. Obviously there could be some conceivable increase in other kinds of death for unrelated reasons, but not that much.
ARandomerDude 6y ago
This isn't a figure I normally track, so I looked it up to get a relative sense of scale during a "normal" year. The CDC says it was 2,839,205 in the USA for 2018. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm
- Retric 6y ago
  In case people are skipping the article. preliminary numbers suggest that the United States is on track to see more than 3.2 million deaths this year, or at least 400,000 more than in 2019.
  - refulgentis 6y ago
    Thanks, took a pass at it for 3 minutes and still couldn't parse numbers out from anywhere.
  - greenbush 6y ago
    .. which is about 14% more deaths in 2020.
  - samspenc 6y ago
    Were the numbers consistent before this year (2020)? That would help indicate what the variance / increase this year was compared to the past, say, 5-10 years or so.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      No. The article even says this; US deaths (unlike most other places) climb every year: U.S. deaths increase most years, so some annual rise in fatalities is expected. But the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15%, and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted. One thing the article doesn't say is the size of the usual 'expected' increase, but if I recall correctly it's about 2%. So a 15% jump would be large. The big question is why is the US so much more badly affected than other places. Sweden, which famously did very little, is on track to see a small increase of perhaps 2%-3% this year over 2018, or just a few thousand deaths, almost not noticeable on the scale of a country. https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-... NB: 2019 in Sweden was the least deadly year for a decade which is one reason comparisons of Sweden vs Norway etc are misleading: the question is not "why did Sweden have higher deaths than Norway in 2020" because it would have done anyway, simply due to catching up from 2019. The question is "why is 2020 going to be a normal year in so many countries but not the USA"?
chromaton 6y ago
Will we see a "rebound" in 2021 with fewer deaths than usual?
- twblalock 6y ago
  Probably we will see more than usual, from other causes that benefit from early detection such as cancer. People avoiding hospitals during the pandemic is probably going to have a bit of an aftereffect.
- brlewis 6y ago
  I don't know about 2021, but at some point we'll see fewer deaths. Lots of people who would otherwise have died in that future year are dying this year.
- radioactivist 6y ago
  If you're already 75 years old your life expectancy is roughly another 10 years (COVID deaths skew to the 70+ age bracket). So I'd expect the "deficit" in deaths to be spread out over at least 5-10 years. This might not be easily resolvable above typical year to year background fluctuations.
EricE 6y ago
I'm sure deaths increasing has nothing to do with population increasing either. I just so love raw numbers without context /s
trident1000 6y ago
400k/330 million (US population) = .12% increase

96 points by tempsy 6y ago

This statistic puts an end to the debate about COVID death reporting. Some said that COVID deaths inflated due to federal subsidies to hospitals with COVID patients. Some said that deaths would have occurred anyway due to the serious medical conditions - co-morbidities - that patients had. With this statistic, the explanation for the huge annual increase can only be COVID.

macintux 6y ago
You're far more optimistic than I am. People can find many ways to mold statistics to fit their beliefs (or simply reject the numbers as a deep state conspiracy). This debate will never be over.
- chii 6y ago
  it's not a debate if they refuse to look at evidence in a scientific and neutral light. Instead, it's a propaganda fight.
  - brlewis 6y ago
    It won't be refusing to look; it will be asserting speculation as fact, e.g. saying that the excess deaths are from increased domestic abuse and suicide because of the lockdown. EDIT: This is not in reference to comments here on HN. I wrote this before seeing any comments referencing those other causes of death, and those comments here on HN are not presenting speculation as fact.
codysc 6y ago
While I agree with your points about the clear indication of covid deaths, unfortunately this will have no impact on the debate. Facts aren't super relevant anymore.
- sangli 6y ago
  Heh! Facts are always relevant when you are debating in good faith. People who find facts not supporting their beliefs argue dishonesty that doesn't mean facts are not relevant.
- ultrarunner 6y ago
  > Facts aren't super relevant anymore. This is so interesting to me. Facts are still important to those seeking truth. Sure, there are a lot of people seeking reassurance ahead of truth, but there are also simply a lot of people. Given that people now have more ability to make their opinions widely known, I suspect that truth and facts are just as relevant as ever, but that loud noises will be made by those who won't be doing anything relevant about it either way. Our ability to judge the relative value of messages is proportional to our ability to reason about the sheer number of people with things to say. I think that wrapping one's mind around the enormity of 330 million people may be valuable towards honing in on not only what messages are important, but what movements simply aren't.
  - macintux 6y ago
    > I suspect that truth and facts are just as relevant as ever The last two elections have broken my faith in that.
    - ultrarunner 6y ago
      Again, lots of people produce lots of opinions. If I'm understanding you correctly, the meme that "the deplorables" all think alike (and are thus wrong) doesn't have much merit after more than a cursory glance.
  - pdkl95 6y ago
    > Facts are still important to those seeking truth. What about the people that don't want to seek truth? > The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-...
ravenstine 6y ago
You're speaking as if this article gives us certainty that the 400,000 extra deaths this year, compared to last year, are due to COVID. The article makes no such claim. Maybe that's not what you meant, though, because clearly there are things like drug overdoses, suicides, domestic violence, etc., that can also explain a lot of it as well. Tens of thousands of people die of fentanyl overdoses each year, and the number was growing up to this point, so it's not farfetched to consider that the COVID restrictions have resulted in more people taking addictive drugs or killing themselves out of desperation.
- macintux 6y ago
  > The article makes no such claim. The article claims 318k COVID deaths. > COVID-19 has killed more than 318,000 Americans and counting. Before it came along, there was reason to be hopeful about U.S. death trends. The numbers also don't highlight the number of unnecessary deaths and suffering because hospitals are overwhelmed. (Edited to include the specific statement I'm refuting.)
- davycro 6y ago
  I’ve worked in four emergency departments in three states this year. All of them have been overwhelmed by patients with covid, and not patients with overdoses, suicides, or domestic violence. Granted the incidence of those non-covid pathologies are likely higher this year, but they are no-way elevated at the scale of covid-19. I haven’t seen, or heard from any colleagues, hospitals brimming with suicides and overdoses to the point where they are filling an entire icu with those patients, or having so many domestic violence cases that they have to shut down operating rooms and convert them into icu beds.
  - karmelapple 6y ago
    Thank you for helping in all these emergency rooms, and I’m sorry that some people are downplaying the virus’s effects on mortality in the USA in 2020.
    - CryptoPunk 6y ago
CryptoPunk 6y ago
There were other factors that differed in 2020 compared to other years, like the effects of the lockdowns: mass-bankrupties [1], social isolation for the elderly [2], an increase in drug-overdoses, a decline in access to quality-of-life enhancing services, etc. Isolation in general is extremely deadly. [3] My guess is that the effects of COVID on the US's 2020 mortality rate were much greater than the effects of the lockdown, but that is just a guess, not a scientifically validated conclusion. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/small-businesses-are-dying-by-the-thousands--and-no-one-is-tracking-the-carnage/2020/08/11/660f9f52-dbda-11ea-b4f1-25b762cdbbf4_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/sm... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hidden-covid-19-health-crisis-elderly-people-are-dying-isolation-n1244853 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hidden-covid-19-health-... [3] https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/dangers-of-loneliness-social-isolation-is-deadlier-than-obesity.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/dangers-of-loneliness-s...
HuwytNashi_004 6y ago
The devil's advocate could point out how trivial it would be to fudge these numbers. "Government releases data showing government is benevolent. Trust government." Better yet, he might point out how absurd it is that we need to wait this long to identify a potentially statistically significant increase in deaths... during one of the worst pandemics in recorded history.
- macintux 6y ago
  > Government releases data showing government is benevolent. Trust government. Don't these numbers show government is incompetent? And the overall increase has been pretty clear for a while now.
matz1 6y ago
>With this statistic, the explanation for the huge annual increase can only be COVID. Do you really think that the lockdown and its effect (the bankruptcy, unemployment, reduced social activity, delayed treatment of other illness, etc) could not cause increase in death ?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- fairity 6y ago
  Not sure why you're downvoted. Your question is valid. That said, I've yet to find solid evidence that supports a substantial rise in suicide rates. The only source I found suggested the opposite: https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352 https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352
  - yibg 6y ago
    I didn't downvote, but it's probably because every time talk about covid related deaths comes up, there is someone that tries to downplay it, and almost always with the same line of reasoning. Problem is it ignores all the actual reports of covid deaths, overwhelmed hospitals and lack of stats on significant increases (or at least significant enough to account for the extra deaths) from other causes. The implication is almost always something along the lines of Covid is just a flu, it's not that deadly and we shouldn't have taken the measures we have.
    - 93po 6y ago
      I see reports that hospital levels are fine, it's just that their dedicated covid areas are filling up. Or that nursing shortages are more to do with layoffs or hiring freezes by penny pinching executives. And reporting that covid deaths are vastly inflated from perverse incentives or political agendas or mandatory rules of which the nuance is lost in reporting. Not saying any of this is true. Just saying I'm not exactly watching Alex Jones or Fox News and this is still the stuff I hear, and just because you hear a report about something doesn't mean it's the arbiter of truth and everyone else is wrong.
just-juan-post 6y ago
Murder + Suicide counted as Covid 19 https://www.skyhinews.com/news/coroner-state-included-a-murder-suicide-in-grands-covid-deaths/ https://www.skyhinews.com/news/coroner-state-included-a-murd... Man with 0.55 blood alcohol level (not a typo) counted as a Covid death https://durangoherald.com/articles/324539 https://durangoherald.com/articles/324539

FlyMoreRockets 6y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513489

MattGaiser 6y ago
These are the same. Your link brings me back here.

PointyFluff 6y ago

1% of the entire US population. Fucking thanks, Magas.

pluc 6y ago
Less of you means less of them too
mcculley 6y ago
> But the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15%, and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted. Not all of that 1% are attributed to COVID. It is still terrible, but one cannot blame the Trumpers for all of the deaths.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

enoughBadMath 6y ago

Every year the flu kills the old, obese, and sick. This is no different but approx 4x more deadly. We will see in future years some of the lowest death counts.

supernova87a 6y ago

Human beings (or maybe America right now) are good, or used to be good, at attacking threats that are: -- large and concentrated -- sudden -- unusual, uncommon -- gruesome Not so good at threats that are: -- everyday, slow -- small, but distributed -- mundane, familiar I guess COVID found our Achilles heel.

MattGaiser 6y ago
Or just anything that is not an equal opportunity killer. Everyone can be killed by a terrorist. Plenty of people believe COVID is no threat to them.
- AnHonestComment 6y ago
  And they’d be right: Someone over 70 is 270x as likely to die of COVID as someone under 50. For anyone under 50 without co-morbidity, then this is just a yearly flu — and destroying your economic future over the flu doesn’t make sense. Having a blanket policy that ignores those differences is unrealistic. IFR numbers are from the CDC’s best estimate: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
  - doctor_eval 6y ago
    So... now we are having a conversation about why one group of 400K people is more worthy of saving than another?
    - throwaway201103 6y ago
      I think, clearly, that there is a debate to be had about the value of lives that are nearly at an end no matter what, and lives that are just hitting their prime.
      - doctor_eval 6y ago
        Someone who is 60 or even 70 is not necessarily “nearly at an end”. Just ask either of your presidents.

throwaway201103 6y ago

Some of this is COVID, no doubt. Most of those deaths are people in their last decade (if not last few years) of life regardless. We had a baby boom in the 1950s. So we should be too surprised to have a death boom starting right about now.

onecommentman 6y ago

A QALY-based analysis would provide a different historical perspective. https://www.healthguideinfo.com/health-informatics/p6185/ https://www.healthguideinfo.com/health-informatics/p6185/ I haven’t seen a QALY-based analysis of the fatality data. Odd, because our State is reporting underlying condition stats and age (by decade) and gender of death daily. Pretty easy to take expected years of life remaining, and quality of life given age and underlying conditions and estimate and come up with an estimate to first order of the “quality life years” lost due to COVID. No one seems to be providing such a QALY estimate. So, let’s do a quick one. For 1917, the comparison year, let’s assume excess deaths were from combat and the Spanish Flu. Combat skews young. So, say, 50 quality years per death. I don’t see any age-specific bias or bias towards underlying conditions one way or another in Spanish Flu cases given this information. And a lot of cases of healthy adults dying, e.g. Australian miners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu So let’s say 30 quality years lost per death. COVID skews old. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi... The median age of COVID death in my county has been in the late 70s Life expectancy tables for US suggest ten years of life remaining for folks in their late 70s. I’ve seen statistics that find degraded quality of life in the last 3 or 4 years of life. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-09-healthy-lifestyle-age-shortens-end-of-life.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-09-healthy-lifestyle-age... Even without underlying conditions, that puts quality life years lost at 8. Underlying conditions predisposing to COVID death will only make it look worse, driving the 8 down to 7 or 6. So, for 1917, 50 years lost in combat combined with 30 quality years lost to the “Spanish Flu”...IDK, let’s say 40 years lost per death. For 2020, COVID excess deaths...6-8 quality years lost. Even after quibbling with numbers, the quality years of life lost are a factor of 5 higher in 1917 as compared to 2020. Based on this, admittedly rough, “analysis”. (You get what you pay for.) I really would like to see a formal QALY analysis of COVID, instead of the ones that many people have already done in their heads.

fairity 6y ago
Apparently if you don't assign infinite value to every person's life, you get downvoted here.

tinalumfoil 6y ago

Wouldn't we generally expect any given year is the deadliest year on record? If we assume (1) the population strictly increases year on year and (2) deaths are proportional to population in a given year, then it would be true. Weaken these assumptions and it should still be true for the most part.

MattGaiser 6y ago
The key part is the "by far." The article addresses this in the first few paragraphs: > U.S. deaths increase most years, so some annual rise in fatalities is expected. But the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15%, and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted. > That would mark the largest single-year percentage leap since 1918, when tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died in World War I and hundreds of thousands of Americans died in a flu pandemic. Deaths rose 46% that year, compared with 1917.
- khuey 6y ago
  And "Deaths usually rise by about 20,000 to 50,000 each year, mainly due to the nation’s aging, and growing, population."
- tinalumfoil 6y ago
  It walks back the significance of the title a bit, but that's different than addressing it. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I would expect far larger number of souls to die from one year to the next even if nothing significant occurred.
  - deleted 6y ago
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twblalock 6y ago
3.2 million (the number from the article) is is 400k more than last year. The latest Covid toll in the NYT tracker is 322,839, and all of those deaths were in 2020. So, there is a gap of 77-78k. Obviously there could be some conceivable increase in other kinds of death for unrelated reasons, but not that much.

ARandomerDude 6y ago

This isn't a figure I normally track, so I looked it up to get a relative sense of scale during a "normal" year. The CDC says it was 2,839,205 in the USA for 2018. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm

Retric 6y ago
In case people are skipping the article. preliminary numbers suggest that the United States is on track to see more than 3.2 million deaths this year, or at least 400,000 more than in 2019.
- refulgentis 6y ago
  Thanks, took a pass at it for 3 minutes and still couldn't parse numbers out from anywhere.
- greenbush 6y ago
  .. which is about 14% more deaths in 2020.
- samspenc 6y ago
  Were the numbers consistent before this year (2020)? That would help indicate what the variance / increase this year was compared to the past, say, 5-10 years or so.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    No. The article even says this; US deaths (unlike most other places) climb every year: U.S. deaths increase most years, so some annual rise in fatalities is expected. But the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15%, and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted. One thing the article doesn't say is the size of the usual 'expected' increase, but if I recall correctly it's about 2%. So a 15% jump would be large. The big question is why is the US so much more badly affected than other places. Sweden, which famously did very little, is on track to see a small increase of perhaps 2%-3% this year over 2018, or just a few thousand deaths, almost not noticeable on the scale of a country. https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-... NB: 2019 in Sweden was the least deadly year for a decade which is one reason comparisons of Sweden vs Norway etc are misleading: the question is not "why did Sweden have higher deaths than Norway in 2020" because it would have done anyway, simply due to catching up from 2019. The question is "why is 2020 going to be a normal year in so many countries but not the USA"?

chromaton 6y ago

Will we see a "rebound" in 2021 with fewer deaths than usual?

twblalock 6y ago
Probably we will see more than usual, from other causes that benefit from early detection such as cancer. People avoiding hospitals during the pandemic is probably going to have a bit of an aftereffect.
brlewis 6y ago
I don't know about 2021, but at some point we'll see fewer deaths. Lots of people who would otherwise have died in that future year are dying this year.
radioactivist 6y ago
If you're already 75 years old your life expectancy is roughly another 10 years (COVID deaths skew to the 70+ age bracket). So I'd expect the "deficit" in deaths to be spread out over at least 5-10 years. This might not be easily resolvable above typical year to year background fluctuations.

EricE 6y ago

I'm sure deaths increasing has nothing to do with population increasing either. I just so love raw numbers without context /s

trident1000 6y ago

400k/330 million (US population) = .12% increase