4 ms·

Is "pointing out" data considered downplaying? ~5% of deaths had "covid only" while the remaining 95% had other factors with the average having 4 other factors.

by cronix 5y ago

Is "pointing out" data considered downplaying? ~5% of deaths had "covid only" while the remaining 95% had other factors with the average having 4 other factors. From the CDC: > Table 3 shows the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The number of deaths that mention one or more of the conditions indicated is shown for all deaths involving COVID-19 and by age groups. For over 5% of these deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death... https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

allturtles 5y ago
Many of those 'additional causes" are things caused by COVID-19. e.g. per that table, out of 560K deaths coded as COVID-19, 257K were also coded as "influenza or pneumonia". That's because Covid causes pneumonia.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Adding to this, pneumonia is merely inflammation of the (aveoli in the) lungs and it is almost always caused by some external factor, such as infection or illness.
nkozyra 5y ago
> Is "pointing out" data considered downplaying? ~5% of deaths had "covid only" while the remaining 95% had other factors with the average having 4 other factors. Is this a useful metric, though? If covid is the catalyst to cause death with preexisting conditions, is not covid the actual cause of death? Covid in these cases is an acute condition that is the direct cause of death.
TameAntelope 5y ago
Yes, it's considered downplaying to try and attribute these people's deaths to something that didn't kill them. If the answer to the question of, "Would this person be alive were it not for COVID?" is "Yes", then COVID killed that person. You should be able to be fragile and still survive, that isn't an excuse to let someone die.
- fastball 5y ago
  That's... exactly the point? Dying with COVID does not mean you would be alive today if you hadn't contracted COVID.
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    How long would you have expected them to remain alive absent COVID? Look at it as a probabilistic spectrum, not a binary choice.
  - newacct583 5y ago
    Exactly! So rather than try to puzzle out this undecidable proposition for nearly a million individual deaths, let's just look at aggregate statistics. Did more people die on the whole during the pandemic than we would normally expect? Does that line up with a model that they probably died from covid? And... that's exactly what the linked article is doing. And yeah, it turns out that all these people (on balance) would indeed still be alive had they not been sick with covid.
    - fastball 5y ago
      The linked article seems to be including suicide as a death resulting from COVID, when the increase in suicides is far more likely to be caused by our response to COVID, not having COVID. It is definitely not only looking at whether people would have died sans covid in their system.
      - newacct583 5y ago
        You think there were a half million excess suicides in the US due to our response to covid? Again, this is just nitpicking at an article that supports a (very obvious) conclusion you find politically inconvenient. As to whether a suicide due to pandemic-induced depression "counts" as being "caused by the pandemic" or not, isn't exactly the kind of confounding effect you railed against above? Isn't the solution, again, to not demand that we micro-classify every death and simply look at the external effects we can measure?
DennisP 5y ago
The relevant question is whether the person would have died anyway, without covid. If not, that's a covid death. Put another way, people in perfect health shouldn't be the only ones whose covid deaths are counted.
kube-system 5y ago
Yes, because many of those comorbidities are conditions that people could otherwise live with for decades... and furthermore, at least a couple of those comorbidities listed in that table are caused by COVID-19: pneumonia and respiratory failure. If an obese person is in a car accident and immediately dies, we say that they died due to the more immediate health event: the car accident. -- even though we know that obese people are more susceptible to death in car accidents.
xkjkls 5y ago
Those other factors like pnuemonia, arrythmia, organ damage, sepsis, etc. are mostly caused by COVID-19. This is like saying that 0% of people who have contracted HIV have ever died of HIV, they died of other diseases. Well, sure, but what allowed those other diseases to be contracted?
Raidion 5y ago
I think where that 5% figure is used incorrectly: if you look at the other factors, they seem to not be "someone had a stroke, caught covid, and died", they're stuff like "Someone had Covid, developed pneumonia and died". The top "other factors" are (in order): Pneumonia, "everything else", respiratory failure, high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiac arrest, heart disease, acute respiratory distress syndrome, etc. It's pretty clear to say that far more than 5% died of Covid induced complications, not that they died of "natural" causes and also tested Covid positive. Saying the 5% number is almost certainly abuse of statistics, especially given the notable uptick in mortality in the US.
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> Is "pointing out" data considered downplaying? I'd consider it playing devil's advocate, depending on the scenario. The problem is, these days I often see a lot of bad faith arguments being passed off as "just playing devil's advocate". You can be obese and diabetic and still live to be 80+ years old. My grandma is both, and will be turning 81 this year. But if someone who is only 30, but obese and diabetic dies to COVID, it's a pretty damn bad faith argument to try to claim that COVID was not the cause of death.
dntrkv 5y ago
At the end of the day, the question is, how many more deaths happened due to COVID than there would be otherwise. For that answer, we can look at excess mortality (which the article uses), which shows more deaths than the official COVID death tally. https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
mssundaram 5y ago
Thank you, somebody with some sense
commandlinefan 5y ago
> ~5% of deaths had "covid only" while the remaining 95% had other factors with the average having 4 other factors Well, I don't even know where to find this kind of data, but your hypothesis could be tested by comparing the number of deaths in 2020 against the number of deaths in 2019, broken down by cause of death.

by cronix 5y ago

allturtles 5y ago

Many of those 'additional causes" are things caused by COVID-19. e.g. per that table, out of 560K deaths coded as COVID-19, 257K were also coded as "influenza or pneumonia". That's because Covid causes pneumonia.

mywittyname 5y ago
Adding to this, pneumonia is merely inflammation of the (aveoli in the) lungs and it is almost always caused by some external factor, such as infection or illness.

nkozyra 5y ago

> Is "pointing out" data considered downplaying? ~5% of deaths had "covid only" while the remaining 95% had other factors with the average having 4 other factors. Is this a useful metric, though? If covid is the catalyst to cause death with preexisting conditions, is not covid the actual cause of death? Covid in these cases is an acute condition that is the direct cause of death.

TameAntelope 5y ago

Yes, it's considered downplaying to try and attribute these people's deaths to something that didn't kill them. If the answer to the question of, "Would this person be alive were it not for COVID?" is "Yes", then COVID killed that person. You should be able to be fragile and still survive, that isn't an excuse to let someone die.

fastball 5y ago
That's... exactly the point? Dying with COVID does not mean you would be alive today if you hadn't contracted COVID.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  How long would you have expected them to remain alive absent COVID? Look at it as a probabilistic spectrum, not a binary choice.
- newacct583 5y ago
  Exactly! So rather than try to puzzle out this undecidable proposition for nearly a million individual deaths, let's just look at aggregate statistics. Did more people die on the whole during the pandemic than we would normally expect? Does that line up with a model that they probably died from covid? And... that's exactly what the linked article is doing. And yeah, it turns out that all these people (on balance) would indeed still be alive had they not been sick with covid.
  - fastball 5y ago
    The linked article seems to be including suicide as a death resulting from COVID, when the increase in suicides is far more likely to be caused by our response to COVID, not having COVID. It is definitely not only looking at whether people would have died sans covid in their system.
    - newacct583 5y ago
      You think there were a half million excess suicides in the US due to our response to covid? Again, this is just nitpicking at an article that supports a (very obvious) conclusion you find politically inconvenient. As to whether a suicide due to pandemic-induced depression "counts" as being "caused by the pandemic" or not, isn't exactly the kind of confounding effect you railed against above? Isn't the solution, again, to not demand that we micro-classify every death and simply look at the external effects we can measure?

DennisP 5y ago

The relevant question is whether the person would have died anyway, without covid. If not, that's a covid death. Put another way, people in perfect health shouldn't be the only ones whose covid deaths are counted.

kube-system 5y ago

Yes, because many of those comorbidities are conditions that people could otherwise live with for decades... and furthermore, at least a couple of those comorbidities listed in that table are caused by COVID-19: pneumonia and respiratory failure. If an obese person is in a car accident and immediately dies, we say that they died due to the more immediate health event: the car accident. -- even though we know that obese people are more susceptible to death in car accidents.

xkjkls 5y ago

Those other factors like pnuemonia, arrythmia, organ damage, sepsis, etc. are mostly caused by COVID-19. This is like saying that 0% of people who have contracted HIV have ever died of HIV, they died of other diseases. Well, sure, but what allowed those other diseases to be contracted?

Raidion 5y ago

I think where that 5% figure is used incorrectly: if you look at the other factors, they seem to not be "someone had a stroke, caught covid, and died", they're stuff like "Someone had Covid, developed pneumonia and died". The top "other factors" are (in order): Pneumonia, "everything else", respiratory failure, high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiac arrest, heart disease, acute respiratory distress syndrome, etc. It's pretty clear to say that far more than 5% died of Covid induced complications, not that they died of "natural" causes and also tested Covid positive. Saying the 5% number is almost certainly abuse of statistics, especially given the notable uptick in mortality in the US.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago

> Is "pointing out" data considered downplaying? I'd consider it playing devil's advocate, depending on the scenario. The problem is, these days I often see a lot of bad faith arguments being passed off as "just playing devil's advocate". You can be obese and diabetic and still live to be 80+ years old. My grandma is both, and will be turning 81 this year. But if someone who is only 30, but obese and diabetic dies to COVID, it's a pretty damn bad faith argument to try to claim that COVID was not the cause of death.

dntrkv 5y ago

At the end of the day, the question is, how many more deaths happened due to COVID than there would be otherwise. For that answer, we can look at excess mortality (which the article uses), which shows more deaths than the official COVID death tally. https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

mssundaram 5y ago

Thank you, somebody with some sense

commandlinefan 5y ago

> ~5% of deaths had "covid only" while the remaining 95% had other factors with the average having 4 other factors Well, I don't even know where to find this kind of data, but your hypothesis could be tested by comparing the number of deaths in 2020 against the number of deaths in 2019, broken down by cause of death.