7 ms·

Did you look at the death rate this year? We are on track for 10٪ excess deaths, most of those with at least a decade of life expectancy. The clinical trial fo

by wbl 6y ago

Did you look at the death rate this year? We are on track for 10٪ excess deaths, most of those with at least a decade of life expectancy. The clinical trial for the vaccine was not going to see this with only a few hundred observed cases. That's only a handful of deaths.

andrewclunn 6y ago
Which makes total sense when people are avoiding medical check ups and hospitals for fear of infection.
helge9210 6y ago
Do you account for people who died from psychological effects of lockdown and job loss, and from not requesting medical assistance for other conditions because of fear of covid-19?
- cygx 6y ago
  Look at the time evolution of excess deaths in countries such as Belgium that were hit hard by the virus: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count?tab=chart&stackMode=absolute&country=~BEL&region=World https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... There's a clear signal we can attribute to Covid infections, whereas any such second order effects are not readily apparent.
  - davrosthedalek 6y ago
    To be fair, many lock-down/fear-of-going-to-the-doctor related things have a much longer fuse. A cancer missed now might kill you in a year or two.
- thebruce87m 6y ago
  Countries like Norway show no significant excess mortality for the year despite lockdowns. Suicides also seem unaffected in the UK: https://twitter.com/samaritans/status/1326184288958746625?s=21 https://twitter.com/samaritans/status/1326184288958746625?s=... Happy to see evidence otherwise.
  - xkbarkar 6y ago
    Did you read the report you linked to ? - The post-lockdown figures were higher than in the equivalent period in 2019 - The higher figures in 2020 should be seen in the context of a rising national rate and maturing real-time surveillance systems; They say , Yes there were more suicides in 2020 than 2019 but that is because suicide rates were rising anyway. and we now monitor them better than we have before. AND the also state (3)There are several important caveats. These are early figures and could change over time or with the inclusion of more areas. We cannot rule out higher rates in some local areas or population sub-groups, especially as the effect of COVID-19 itself has varied between communities; http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=51861 http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=51861 So not unaffected by any means but lockdown impact is still not determined.
    - thebruce87m 6y ago
      Yes? I think you covered the main points which don’t seem to disagree with what I was saying although from your response it seems like you think they do? The caveat about the sample size and area is valid, but it did cover 9 million people which is a significant proportion of the population.
      - xkbarkar 6y ago
        You claimed that suicide rates are unaffected. They are not. They have increased. We don't know why they have increased, we don't even know if the current numbers are accurate. It may very well be due to lockdown. Suicide rates may well be higher than has currently been reported. This report acknowledges that. You however did not. You pretty much trivialized the severity of the truth behind these horrible numbers. I think you never read the report and just copied the twitter statement, and are now irritated because you got called on it. For arguments sake If I state that medical doctors have the highest suicide rates among all the professions (which is true). Would you still trivialize the 2020 increase in suicide rates if I could show you that more oncologists took their own lives in 2020 than in 2019? What if I could show you that the increase comes from unemployed, physically healthy men under the age of 35? What if there is a steep increase in suicides among the elderly who have sheltered in place since march ? Context is everything. This report acknowledges that proper context is still missing, and it's preliminary to draw conclusions other than that it looks like the increase was to be expected. Which in itself is (pardon my french) fucking abysmal and should not go ignored.
- triceratops 6y ago
  If we're doing second-order effects, did you account for the lives saved by less driving around due to lockdowns? The lives saved by less air pollution? The lives saved by ensuring the healthcare systems weren't overloaded?
hombre_fatal 6y ago
> 10٪ FWIW, that "Arabic percent sign" is barely visible on my 13" laptop while ASCII's "%" is impossible to miss.
- rsync 6y ago
  Yeah ... genuinely interested: What typing tool, or mechanism, were you using that your '1' '0' and '%' typed out in a different character set than the rest of your comment ? Or was it manually inserted ? If so, why ?
  - wbl 6y ago
    I just used my phone keyboard. No idea it mapped to that character!
iso1210 6y ago
In an average year there are about 350,000 deaths in the UK. This year we've had 415,000 - 18% more deaths. The promises from the covid-skeptics were that covid "just killed off people a few months earlier". That hasn't borne out -- in the North West where we suffered from a second wave in October, which led to 40% increase on expected deaths each week for the entire of November (people catching in October) and hospitals reached the peaks they were at in April. The partial tiered restrictions stopped the growth, but it took the full blown lockdown to bring those deaths down to "just" 10% above normal. The figures for this latest wave, starting from the South East, are far more concerning than the mini wave we had in the north in October - not just cases, but hospitilations too. Now I'm under 45, I don't have much to worry about from actually contracting covid and dying (about 1 in 4,000, normal risk of death is about 1 in 1,000) The potential longer term effects are a little more concerning, but what worries the hell out of me is hospital overload. In the last year there have been 260,000 people going into hospital with a positive covid test. Now not all people who died while having covid died because of covid, but the number with covid on the death certificate is actually higher than the excess deaths. Even if I don't care at all about the over 50s, given the number of people who have had covid and the percentage going into hospital, if it ran rampant throughout the UK over the next 3 months, we'd be looking at another 600,000 excess deaths and 2 million+ extra hospitalisations, in for an average 10 days. There are about 100,000 hospital beds in total in the UK, and staffing to just about meet that number. What will we do with the millions who won't be able to get a bed (including under 45s who get run over?). Should the law be changed so that anyone over the age of 60 forfeits their right to hospital care?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- xkbarkar 6y ago
  Where are you getting these numbers? "There were 616,014 deaths registered in the UK in 2018, an increase of 1.5% from 607,172 in 2017." https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/datasets/vitalstatisticspopulationandhealthreferencetables https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

by wbl 6y ago

andrewclunn 6y ago

Which makes total sense when people are avoiding medical check ups and hospitals for fear of infection.

helge9210 6y ago

Do you account for people who died from psychological effects of lockdown and job loss, and from not requesting medical assistance for other conditions because of fear of covid-19?

cygx 6y ago
Look at the time evolution of excess deaths in countries such as Belgium that were hit hard by the virus: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count?tab=chart&stackMode=absolute&country=~BEL&region=World https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... There's a clear signal we can attribute to Covid infections, whereas any such second order effects are not readily apparent.
- davrosthedalek 6y ago
  To be fair, many lock-down/fear-of-going-to-the-doctor related things have a much longer fuse. A cancer missed now might kill you in a year or two.
thebruce87m 6y ago
Countries like Norway show no significant excess mortality for the year despite lockdowns. Suicides also seem unaffected in the UK: https://twitter.com/samaritans/status/1326184288958746625?s=21 https://twitter.com/samaritans/status/1326184288958746625?s=... Happy to see evidence otherwise.
- xkbarkar 6y ago
  Did you read the report you linked to ? - The post-lockdown figures were higher than in the equivalent period in 2019 - The higher figures in 2020 should be seen in the context of a rising national rate and maturing real-time surveillance systems; They say , Yes there were more suicides in 2020 than 2019 but that is because suicide rates were rising anyway. and we now monitor them better than we have before. AND the also state (3)There are several important caveats. These are early figures and could change over time or with the inclusion of more areas. We cannot rule out higher rates in some local areas or population sub-groups, especially as the effect of COVID-19 itself has varied between communities; http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=51861 http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=51861 So not unaffected by any means but lockdown impact is still not determined.
  - thebruce87m 6y ago
    Yes? I think you covered the main points which don’t seem to disagree with what I was saying although from your response it seems like you think they do? The caveat about the sample size and area is valid, but it did cover 9 million people which is a significant proportion of the population.
    - xkbarkar 6y ago
      You claimed that suicide rates are unaffected. They are not. They have increased. We don't know why they have increased, we don't even know if the current numbers are accurate. It may very well be due to lockdown. Suicide rates may well be higher than has currently been reported. This report acknowledges that. You however did not. You pretty much trivialized the severity of the truth behind these horrible numbers. I think you never read the report and just copied the twitter statement, and are now irritated because you got called on it. For arguments sake If I state that medical doctors have the highest suicide rates among all the professions (which is true). Would you still trivialize the 2020 increase in suicide rates if I could show you that more oncologists took their own lives in 2020 than in 2019? What if I could show you that the increase comes from unemployed, physically healthy men under the age of 35? What if there is a steep increase in suicides among the elderly who have sheltered in place since march ? Context is everything. This report acknowledges that proper context is still missing, and it's preliminary to draw conclusions other than that it looks like the increase was to be expected. Which in itself is (pardon my french) fucking abysmal and should not go ignored.
triceratops 6y ago
If we're doing second-order effects, did you account for the lives saved by less driving around due to lockdowns? The lives saved by less air pollution? The lives saved by ensuring the healthcare systems weren't overloaded?

hombre_fatal 6y ago

> 10٪ FWIW, that "Arabic percent sign" is barely visible on my 13" laptop while ASCII's "%" is impossible to miss.

rsync 6y ago
Yeah ... genuinely interested: What typing tool, or mechanism, were you using that your '1' '0' and '%' typed out in a different character set than the rest of your comment ? Or was it manually inserted ? If so, why ?
- wbl 6y ago
  I just used my phone keyboard. No idea it mapped to that character!

iso1210 6y ago

In an average year there are about 350,000 deaths in the UK. This year we've had 415,000 - 18% more deaths. The promises from the covid-skeptics were that covid "just killed off people a few months earlier". That hasn't borne out -- in the North West where we suffered from a second wave in October, which led to 40% increase on expected deaths each week for the entire of November (people catching in October) and hospitals reached the peaks they were at in April. The partial tiered restrictions stopped the growth, but it took the full blown lockdown to bring those deaths down to "just" 10% above normal. The figures for this latest wave, starting from the South East, are far more concerning than the mini wave we had in the north in October - not just cases, but hospitilations too. Now I'm under 45, I don't have much to worry about from actually contracting covid and dying (about 1 in 4,000, normal risk of death is about 1 in 1,000) The potential longer term effects are a little more concerning, but what worries the hell out of me is hospital overload. In the last year there have been 260,000 people going into hospital with a positive covid test. Now not all people who died while having covid died because of covid, but the number with covid on the death certificate is actually higher than the excess deaths. Even if I don't care at all about the over 50s, given the number of people who have had covid and the percentage going into hospital, if it ran rampant throughout the UK over the next 3 months, we'd be looking at another 600,000 excess deaths and 2 million+ extra hospitalisations, in for an average 10 days. There are about 100,000 hospital beds in total in the UK, and staffing to just about meet that number. What will we do with the millions who won't be able to get a bed (including under 45s who get run over?). Should the law be changed so that anyone over the age of 60 forfeits their right to hospital care?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
xkbarkar 6y ago
Where are you getting these numbers? "There were 616,014 deaths registered in the UK in 2018, an increase of 1.5% from 607,172 in 2017." https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/datasets/vitalstatisticspopulationandhealthreferencetables https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...