11 ms·

I'm curious if there's a good way to breakdown how much is caused by COVID vs., say, caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides,

I'm curious if there's a good way to breakdown how much is caused by COVID vs., say, caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides, etc.). For example the US suicide rate declined from 2018 to 2019, but went back up in 2020. Naively assuming that all of the increase was due to the effects of the lockdowns would attribute ~2,880 suicides to them (or more if in a counterfactual world the suicide rate was going to continue declining if there hadn't been a lockdown). Obviously the real causes of these suicides would be difficult to impossible to determine with certainty, making this a difficult path to explore. In the UK a study predicts a 7.9-9.6% increase in breast cancer deaths within 5 years of diagnosis due to diagnostic delays caused by COVID. For other cancers their estimates vary, i.e. 15.3%-16.6% for colorectal, 4.8%-5.3% for lung, etc. thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(20)30388-0/fulltext Basically I guess what I'm really trying to get at is that while COVID is certainly a terrible disease, there seems to have been little to no cost-benefit analysis performed by policy makers regarding the lockdowns and other attempts to combat it.

joshuahedlund 6y ago
Suicides declined in 2020 [1] Cost benefit analysis is important. But it's pretty clear the vast majority of excess deaths were covid related, because there's a very strong correlation between excess deaths and reported covid cases/deaths, even when you look at different states that had different peaks at different times, and no such correlation to other responses like different types of lockdowns. More delayed / indirect / long-term effects might be harder to measure though. [1]https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-mental-health-26196eaf-a245-4d21-85eb-eeb864a24449.html https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-me...
- HideousKojima 6y ago
  Weird, the first result when I did a search claimed it went up to 14.8 per 100,000 this year, from 13.9 per 100,000 last year according to the Google summary, but the actual page doesn't seem to actually have that data: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measure/Suicide/state/ALL https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measur... Looks like the CDC data is still preliminary? So I guess we'll have to wait and see what the actual number is. EDIT: Looking through the charts on that link it does list a 14.8 for 2020 suicides but doesn't seem to have a source?
  - gmiller123456 6y ago
    Likewise, you should cite a source for your statistics in your original post.
- Taylor_OD 6y ago
  Isnt that true during many major world events that are bad? I cant remember the study but I recall reading that during WW1 and WW2 suicides declined greatly even though it was a terrible time for many.
  - watwut 6y ago
    This is going to depend which place and group of people you talk about. Suicides of Jews in Germany went up by the start of WW2 - source is Richard J Evans; Third Reich Trilogy. He had no stats about non-jews. But, being oppressed and humiliated definitely made some Jewish Germans to kill themselves. (Convolute phrase, but plenty of them considered themselves Germans, so.) And it was much easier to commit suicide by lettin other people kill you too. America is might be different, because it did not happened on their soil.
    - sundaeofshock 6y ago
      > being oppressed and humiliated definitely made some Jewish Germans to kill themselves. (Convolute phrase, but plenty of them considered themselves Germans, so.) < They — like my grandparents —considered themselves German because they were German. The othering of Jews, that they are not really English/Spanish/German/Russian (to name a few examples), has been used to justify the persecution of Jews for the last 2000 years.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    Because you don't think too much about your own suffering when you hear about the suffering of others... probably.
- Miner49er 6y ago
  Yeah, but some claim overall "deaths of despair" went up [1], which is probably better to use here. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/deaths-of-despair-during-covid-19-rose-by-up-to-60-in-2020-new-research-says-2021-01-04 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/deaths-of-despair-during-c...
  - petertodd 6y ago
    For example, overdoses and suicides are often quite difficult to distinguish. Suicidal ideation does appear to have increased: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm?s_cid=mm6932a1_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm?s_cid=mm... But it doesn't correlate well to actual suicide rates. It's also quite possible that the emphasis on suicides has in fact raised awareness enough to prevent them. Or perhaps the way people are dealing with the stresses that lead to suicide has changed, resulting in that being expressed in some other way. Or a mix of all these factors.
- grumpyautist 6y ago
  That's an assumption made off incomplete data.
insickness 6y ago
The health impacts due to social/psychological effects alone of lockdown may be substantial. As an analogue, the annual spike of deaths around the holiday period increases “somewhere between 3% and 9% depending on the demographic group you look at, and between 1% and 10%, depending on the cause of death analyzed.” https://www.us-funerals.com/deaths-spike-on-christmas-day/ https://www.us-funerals.com/deaths-spike-on-christmas-day/
xorfish 6y ago
You could compare the excess deaths for New Zealand, South Korea, Australia and other countries that were able to prevent Sars-CoV-2 from spreading with strict lockdowns. Diagnostic delays are not caused by lockdowns. They are caused by an overwhelmed health care system or the fear of infection, both of which are caused by high incidence. You also need to consider the damage that long covid possibly do over the next 30 years. If only 1% of the working age population that got infected suffers permanent disability, then the cost-benefit analysis will show that a low incidence strategy is clearly the better strategy. Here are the statistics for Australia. They had a strict lockdown when cases where high. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provisional-mortality-statistics/latest-release https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provis...
- aqme28 6y ago
  Or even by state. Hawaii had a strict lockdown but low excess mortality. Arizona and Texas had weak lockdowns but high excess mortality.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    There's absolutely no correlation between lockdown policy and mortality. For example, click the link above and compare Florida to California. Florida has been wide open since last summer (over 9 months now) and has performed about the same as California. And you can cherry pick Hawaii, but New York and New Jersey have been among the most strict lockdowns and they find themselves in the top 3. It seems to help to be an island country or state though, or a geographically isolated region like South Korea or Alaska, as they can screen people coming into the country and there's not a lot of cross-pollination with tight border controls.
    - petertodd 6y ago
      > Florida has been wide open since last summer (over 9 months now) and has performed about the same as California. Remember that Florida has a significantly older population than California too. 2.1% of the population >85 years old vs 1.3%; 17.6% over 65 years old vs 10.6%. COVID deaths are very concentrated in the elderly. The CDC estimates that the 85+ age group has a 8700x higher chance an infection leading to death, and a 95x higher chance of infection leading to hospitalization, than the 5-17 age group. The article appears to be using non-age-adjusted excess deaths. So California and Florida being equal is a strong sign that California did significantly worse. https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/florida/demographic-statistics https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/florida/demographic-sta... https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/demographic-statistics https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/demographic-... 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...
viraptor 6y ago
> caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides, etc.) That's a dangerous way to phrase it. People would delay the elective medical procedures due to covid, even without lockdown. Overwhelmed hospitals would enforce the same. The covid/lockdown split of excess deaths is very complicated in itself.
- petertodd 6y ago
  Since natural immunity is durable, an unmitigated pandemic would be over sooner. So in many circumstances the hospitals would be overloaded for less total time and thus lead to less non-covid excess deaths. Here in Canada, excess deaths in 2020 for the 15 to 64 age range has been abnormally high, starting in March. Yet, unlike older age groups, the level of excess does not follow the pattern of reported COVID infections. That looks like deaths from lockdown and delayed medical care. I personally know people who, for example, put off getting potential cancers checked out due to fear of covid. Similarly, I had to convince some people to go to the hospital for potentially serious non-covid symptoms who were afraid to do so because of covid. Source: https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/ https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/
  - BadInformatics 6y ago
    This analysis presumes that hospital emergency and critical care capacity is flexible (it's not), that we can expect medical professionals to keep on performing at 100% in the face of overwhelming stress (they will not), and that Canada would somehow succeed at what Italy did not back in the first half of 2020 by doing even less mitigation. An argument in favour of no mitigation would have to demonstrate: 1. covid-related mortality and morbidity would not make up for any drop in other excess deaths 2. short-term stops on all non-critical care would, on balance, result in a significant drop in excess deaths over longer-term stops on a smaller percentage of non-critical care 3. hospital systems and their staff would still be intact after such a large wave. This may sound crazy, but while we're trading anecdotes you may be surprised at how many ICU nurses considered quitting because of how hard the latest surge hit. These are the people who dictate how many "ICU beds" we have, not the physical beds themselves! 4. that we can make any kind of meaningful analytical statement on covid mortality vs excess mortality for a specific age group given the lack of reporting data on both. In particular, data from coroner's offices on covid deaths has a huge lag time at present. Looking at case counts only is a poor proxy given you have to model infection -> death/recovery/discharge lag times, geographical variations and healthcare capacity as well. The HMD link merely provides total counts and proportions with no additional commentary. You can find more specific discussions on the subject [1], but they don't cover demographic breakdowns over time and necessarily maintain a high degree of uncertainty. I don't think it's controversial to say governmental policy here has been sub-optimal at best. But to say that one extreme approach or the other is what we ought to have done based on woefully incomplete data is a stretch too. [1] https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-summary-covid-19-cases.html#a4 https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-s...
ebiester 6y ago
Even still, you're balancing the number of people dying from the lockdown against the number of people who would have died if the hospitals would have been completely overwhelmed (a la NYC, Wuhan, India, and Italy in various times of the pandemic.) The "what ifs" get harder to calculate.
RacfeelBudkind 6y ago
On the other hand Covid-19 would have killed many more people directly if action hadn't been taken to mitigate it's spread. Probably exponentially more people, based on how viruses typically spread. In other words, the comparison isn't between how many people Covid-19 did kill and how many preventative measures did. It's between how many it would have killed and how many preventative measures did. While there's a lot of uncertainty in how many people Covid-19 would have killed, it's still certainly higher than the preventative measures.
- hedora 6y ago
  In the US, 33-50% of the population apparently had antibodies pre-vaccination, and we apparently did a terrible job keeping it out of nursing homes (so the percentage that caught it that died was higher than it would have been across the whole population). So, it would have killed 2-3x more people, max. There were strategies that were developed after the 1918 pandemic that probably would have saved more people than the lockdown at much lower cost, but they were ignored by the politicians. The basic idea was to focus all resources on protecting the vulnerable, and let the disease run its course quickly. Effectively protecting the vulnerable during extended lockdowns is extremely difficult, and the COVID lockdown was no exception.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    > So, it would have killed 2-3x more people, max. You are very cavalier with somewhere around 1.1-1.6 million extra deaths, to date. That's your GOOD number? If that's your anti-intervention argument, I'm unconvinced. Saving a million lives is worth a lot to me.
  - sgt101 6y ago
    >In the US, 33-50% of the population apparently had antibodies pre-vaccination Where did that number come from? I have read more like 8% (https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)32009-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)32009-2/full...) So - 2 to 3x... Nope. 8 - 10x. What I want to know is why you have constructed this belief and want to propagate it when it is refuted by a google search in 10 seconds flat?
QuadmasterXLII 6y ago
The obvious way to do this analysis is to look at all cause death rates in countries that locked down successfully, like china, new zealand, or australia, and see that there was no spike
bjornsing 6y ago
> In the UK a study predicts a 7.9-9.6% increase in breast cancer deaths within 5 years of diagnosis due to diagnostic delays caused by COVID. [...] Basically I guess what I'm really trying to get at is that while COVID is certainly a terrible disease, there seems to have been little to no cost-benefit analysis performed by policy makers regarding the lockdowns and other attempts to combat it. I see this line of reasoning a lot, even in mainstream media here in Sweden, but it seems flawed to me. As I see it diagnostic delays and delayed elective care is caused by a lack of lockdown or other stringent decease control measures. It’s when hospitals are overrun by people infected with SARS-CoV-2 that they have to delay other care. This happens due to rapid spread of the virus, which happens when lockdown is not imposed. What’s the argument for the parents opposite line of reasoning?
- whizzter 6y ago
  As a datapoint on Sweden, we have a normally pretty well functioning breast cancer screening system where women between 40-74 are to be offered a screening opportunity every other year. In 2019 more than 800 000 screenings were done (with 8288 cancer cases discovered in the country that year) and this system has been credited for pushing down the yearly cancer deaths due to earlier discoveries. In 2020 there was 160 000 less screenings so we can probably expect an increase in number of deadly cases in the coming years. (Source, https://www.dn.se/sverige/en-av-fem-kvinnor-screenades-inte-riskerar-att-missa-vard/ https://www.dn.se/sverige/en-av-fem-kvinnor-screenades-inte-... )
  - bjornsing 6y ago
    Ok, but again: The primary reason for this is the significant spread of SARS-CoV-2 which has overwhelmed hospitals. This in turn could have been prevented with lockdown(s). Right?
    - rm445 6y ago
      The hospitals weren't (all) overwhelmed but were focused on managing the pandemic. Fewer appointments scheduled, procedures pushed back, no weekend services, that kind of thing. Perhaps an element of patients huddling at home and being less proactive in their own care. (Btw I'm not in healthcare. If anything my point is a logical alternative to the idea that overwhelmed covid wards could be the only thing affecting other services. But it's my impression of how things seemed to be, at least in the UK).
mxcrossb 6y ago
> there seems to have been little to no cost-benefit analysis performed by policy makers regarding the lockdowns and other attempts to combat it. What evidence do you have of this? This seems like a baseless criticism.

joshuahedlund 6y ago

Suicides declined in 2020 [1] Cost benefit analysis is important. But it's pretty clear the vast majority of excess deaths were covid related, because there's a very strong correlation between excess deaths and reported covid cases/deaths, even when you look at different states that had different peaks at different times, and no such correlation to other responses like different types of lockdowns. More delayed / indirect / long-term effects might be harder to measure though. [1]https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-mental-health-26196eaf-a245-4d21-85eb-eeb864a24449.html https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-me...

HideousKojima 6y ago
Weird, the first result when I did a search claimed it went up to 14.8 per 100,000 this year, from 13.9 per 100,000 last year according to the Google summary, but the actual page doesn't seem to actually have that data: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measure/Suicide/state/ALL https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measur... Looks like the CDC data is still preliminary? So I guess we'll have to wait and see what the actual number is. EDIT: Looking through the charts on that link it does list a 14.8 for 2020 suicides but doesn't seem to have a source?
- gmiller123456 6y ago
  Likewise, you should cite a source for your statistics in your original post.
Taylor_OD 6y ago
Isnt that true during many major world events that are bad? I cant remember the study but I recall reading that during WW1 and WW2 suicides declined greatly even though it was a terrible time for many.
- watwut 6y ago
  This is going to depend which place and group of people you talk about. Suicides of Jews in Germany went up by the start of WW2 - source is Richard J Evans; Third Reich Trilogy. He had no stats about non-jews. But, being oppressed and humiliated definitely made some Jewish Germans to kill themselves. (Convolute phrase, but plenty of them considered themselves Germans, so.) And it was much easier to commit suicide by lettin other people kill you too. America is might be different, because it did not happened on their soil.
  - sundaeofshock 6y ago
    > being oppressed and humiliated definitely made some Jewish Germans to kill themselves. (Convolute phrase, but plenty of them considered themselves Germans, so.) < They — like my grandparents —considered themselves German because they were German. The othering of Jews, that they are not really English/Spanish/German/Russian (to name a few examples), has been used to justify the persecution of Jews for the last 2000 years.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  Because you don't think too much about your own suffering when you hear about the suffering of others... probably.
Miner49er 6y ago
Yeah, but some claim overall "deaths of despair" went up [1], which is probably better to use here. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/deaths-of-despair-during-covid-19-rose-by-up-to-60-in-2020-new-research-says-2021-01-04 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/deaths-of-despair-during-c...
- petertodd 6y ago
  For example, overdoses and suicides are often quite difficult to distinguish. Suicidal ideation does appear to have increased: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm?s_cid=mm6932a1_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm?s_cid=mm... But it doesn't correlate well to actual suicide rates. It's also quite possible that the emphasis on suicides has in fact raised awareness enough to prevent them. Or perhaps the way people are dealing with the stresses that lead to suicide has changed, resulting in that being expressed in some other way. Or a mix of all these factors.
grumpyautist 6y ago
That's an assumption made off incomplete data.

insickness 6y ago

The health impacts due to social/psychological effects alone of lockdown may be substantial. As an analogue, the annual spike of deaths around the holiday period increases “somewhere between 3% and 9% depending on the demographic group you look at, and between 1% and 10%, depending on the cause of death analyzed.” https://www.us-funerals.com/deaths-spike-on-christmas-day/ https://www.us-funerals.com/deaths-spike-on-christmas-day/

xorfish 6y ago

You could compare the excess deaths for New Zealand, South Korea, Australia and other countries that were able to prevent Sars-CoV-2 from spreading with strict lockdowns. Diagnostic delays are not caused by lockdowns. They are caused by an overwhelmed health care system or the fear of infection, both of which are caused by high incidence. You also need to consider the damage that long covid possibly do over the next 30 years. If only 1% of the working age population that got infected suffers permanent disability, then the cost-benefit analysis will show that a low incidence strategy is clearly the better strategy. Here are the statistics for Australia. They had a strict lockdown when cases where high. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provisional-mortality-statistics/latest-release https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provis...

aqme28 6y ago
Or even by state. Hawaii had a strict lockdown but low excess mortality. Arizona and Texas had weak lockdowns but high excess mortality.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  There's absolutely no correlation between lockdown policy and mortality. For example, click the link above and compare Florida to California. Florida has been wide open since last summer (over 9 months now) and has performed about the same as California. And you can cherry pick Hawaii, but New York and New Jersey have been among the most strict lockdowns and they find themselves in the top 3. It seems to help to be an island country or state though, or a geographically isolated region like South Korea or Alaska, as they can screen people coming into the country and there's not a lot of cross-pollination with tight border controls.
  - petertodd 6y ago
    > Florida has been wide open since last summer (over 9 months now) and has performed about the same as California. Remember that Florida has a significantly older population than California too. 2.1% of the population >85 years old vs 1.3%; 17.6% over 65 years old vs 10.6%. COVID deaths are very concentrated in the elderly. The CDC estimates that the 85+ age group has a 8700x higher chance an infection leading to death, and a 95x higher chance of infection leading to hospitalization, than the 5-17 age group. The article appears to be using non-age-adjusted excess deaths. So California and Florida being equal is a strong sign that California did significantly worse. https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/florida/demographic-statistics https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/florida/demographic-sta... https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/demographic-statistics https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/demographic-... 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...

viraptor 6y ago

> caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides, etc.) That's a dangerous way to phrase it. People would delay the elective medical procedures due to covid, even without lockdown. Overwhelmed hospitals would enforce the same. The covid/lockdown split of excess deaths is very complicated in itself.

petertodd 6y ago
Since natural immunity is durable, an unmitigated pandemic would be over sooner. So in many circumstances the hospitals would be overloaded for less total time and thus lead to less non-covid excess deaths. Here in Canada, excess deaths in 2020 for the 15 to 64 age range has been abnormally high, starting in March. Yet, unlike older age groups, the level of excess does not follow the pattern of reported COVID infections. That looks like deaths from lockdown and delayed medical care. I personally know people who, for example, put off getting potential cancers checked out due to fear of covid. Similarly, I had to convince some people to go to the hospital for potentially serious non-covid symptoms who were afraid to do so because of covid. Source: https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/ https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/
- BadInformatics 6y ago
  This analysis presumes that hospital emergency and critical care capacity is flexible (it's not), that we can expect medical professionals to keep on performing at 100% in the face of overwhelming stress (they will not), and that Canada would somehow succeed at what Italy did not back in the first half of 2020 by doing even less mitigation. An argument in favour of no mitigation would have to demonstrate: 1. covid-related mortality and morbidity would not make up for any drop in other excess deaths 2. short-term stops on all non-critical care would, on balance, result in a significant drop in excess deaths over longer-term stops on a smaller percentage of non-critical care 3. hospital systems and their staff would still be intact after such a large wave. This may sound crazy, but while we're trading anecdotes you may be surprised at how many ICU nurses considered quitting because of how hard the latest surge hit. These are the people who dictate how many "ICU beds" we have, not the physical beds themselves! 4. that we can make any kind of meaningful analytical statement on covid mortality vs excess mortality for a specific age group given the lack of reporting data on both. In particular, data from coroner's offices on covid deaths has a huge lag time at present. Looking at case counts only is a poor proxy given you have to model infection -> death/recovery/discharge lag times, geographical variations and healthcare capacity as well. The HMD link merely provides total counts and proportions with no additional commentary. You can find more specific discussions on the subject [1], but they don't cover demographic breakdowns over time and necessarily maintain a high degree of uncertainty. I don't think it's controversial to say governmental policy here has been sub-optimal at best. But to say that one extreme approach or the other is what we ought to have done based on woefully incomplete data is a stretch too. [1] https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-summary-covid-19-cases.html#a4 https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-s...

ebiester 6y ago

Even still, you're balancing the number of people dying from the lockdown against the number of people who would have died if the hospitals would have been completely overwhelmed (a la NYC, Wuhan, India, and Italy in various times of the pandemic.) The "what ifs" get harder to calculate.

RacfeelBudkind 6y ago

On the other hand Covid-19 would have killed many more people directly if action hadn't been taken to mitigate it's spread. Probably exponentially more people, based on how viruses typically spread. In other words, the comparison isn't between how many people Covid-19 did kill and how many preventative measures did. It's between how many it would have killed and how many preventative measures did. While there's a lot of uncertainty in how many people Covid-19 would have killed, it's still certainly higher than the preventative measures.

hedora 6y ago
In the US, 33-50% of the population apparently had antibodies pre-vaccination, and we apparently did a terrible job keeping it out of nursing homes (so the percentage that caught it that died was higher than it would have been across the whole population). So, it would have killed 2-3x more people, max. There were strategies that were developed after the 1918 pandemic that probably would have saved more people than the lockdown at much lower cost, but they were ignored by the politicians. The basic idea was to focus all resources on protecting the vulnerable, and let the disease run its course quickly. Effectively protecting the vulnerable during extended lockdowns is extremely difficult, and the COVID lockdown was no exception.
- majormajor 6y ago
  > So, it would have killed 2-3x more people, max. You are very cavalier with somewhere around 1.1-1.6 million extra deaths, to date. That's your GOOD number? If that's your anti-intervention argument, I'm unconvinced. Saving a million lives is worth a lot to me.
- sgt101 6y ago
  >In the US, 33-50% of the population apparently had antibodies pre-vaccination Where did that number come from? I have read more like 8% (https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)32009-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)32009-2/full...) So - 2 to 3x... Nope. 8 - 10x. What I want to know is why you have constructed this belief and want to propagate it when it is refuted by a google search in 10 seconds flat?

QuadmasterXLII 6y ago

The obvious way to do this analysis is to look at all cause death rates in countries that locked down successfully, like china, new zealand, or australia, and see that there was no spike

bjornsing 6y ago

> In the UK a study predicts a 7.9-9.6% increase in breast cancer deaths within 5 years of diagnosis due to diagnostic delays caused by COVID. [...] Basically I guess what I'm really trying to get at is that while COVID is certainly a terrible disease, there seems to have been little to no cost-benefit analysis performed by policy makers regarding the lockdowns and other attempts to combat it. I see this line of reasoning a lot, even in mainstream media here in Sweden, but it seems flawed to me. As I see it diagnostic delays and delayed elective care is caused by a lack of lockdown or other stringent decease control measures. It’s when hospitals are overrun by people infected with SARS-CoV-2 that they have to delay other care. This happens due to rapid spread of the virus, which happens when lockdown is not imposed. What’s the argument for the parents opposite line of reasoning?

whizzter 6y ago
As a datapoint on Sweden, we have a normally pretty well functioning breast cancer screening system where women between 40-74 are to be offered a screening opportunity every other year. In 2019 more than 800 000 screenings were done (with 8288 cancer cases discovered in the country that year) and this system has been credited for pushing down the yearly cancer deaths due to earlier discoveries. In 2020 there was 160 000 less screenings so we can probably expect an increase in number of deadly cases in the coming years. (Source, https://www.dn.se/sverige/en-av-fem-kvinnor-screenades-inte-riskerar-att-missa-vard/ https://www.dn.se/sverige/en-av-fem-kvinnor-screenades-inte-... )
- bjornsing 6y ago
  Ok, but again: The primary reason for this is the significant spread of SARS-CoV-2 which has overwhelmed hospitals. This in turn could have been prevented with lockdown(s). Right?
  - rm445 6y ago
    The hospitals weren't (all) overwhelmed but were focused on managing the pandemic. Fewer appointments scheduled, procedures pushed back, no weekend services, that kind of thing. Perhaps an element of patients huddling at home and being less proactive in their own care. (Btw I'm not in healthcare. If anything my point is a logical alternative to the idea that overwhelmed covid wards could be the only thing affecting other services. But it's my impression of how things seemed to be, at least in the UK).

mxcrossb 6y ago

> there seems to have been little to no cost-benefit analysis performed by policy makers regarding the lockdowns and other attempts to combat it. What evidence do you have of this? This seems like a baseless criticism.