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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 p

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 6y ago
That's... exactly the point? Dying with COVID does not mean you would be alive today if you hadn't contracted COVID.
- anigbrowl 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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?
      - fastball 6y ago
        A conclusion I find politically inconvenient? You have no idea what my politics are, please stop projecting. To answer your question though, no, they should not be lumped together because they are not the same thing and so the mitigations would've/could've/should've been different. In other words, lumping all these things together as "caused by COVID" is the opposite of useful. For example, you do better next time with deaths due to COVID in your system (category "a") by ramping up vaccination faster/better facemask policy/earlier lockdowns/etc. You can decrease category "b" by having more hospital beds / more healthcare capacity. You can reduce the deaths in category "c" (seemingly suicides) by having lockdowns that aren't up-and-down rollercoasters / better mental healthcare / etc. All of these, though being "due to COVID" should be handled very differently so it is counterproductive to lump them all together. Again, I think you might be projecting a bit here, because the only reason I can think of that you would want to lump them together is to push a political agenda. Not for any utilitarian reason.
- xkjkls 6y ago
  That's what he is attempting to imply is a massive overcounting in the data, but additional conditions that people point out as COVID deaths also having are mostly caused by COVID-19. Oh, they died of viral pneumonia after contracting COVID-19; pretty sure they would be in a different scenario had they not caught COVID-19.
  - fastball 6y ago
    The problem is we don't know, and "both sides" don't seem willing to admit that. What I can guarantee is that of those 95% who died with COVID, some percentage of them would have died anyway, under almost identical circumstances, except without COVID. However, it is also true that some of those people would have lived if they hadn't contracted COVID, even though COVID was not the "direct" cause of death. For how much longer, who knows. But certainly not when they did. In other words: the people saying we should only be counting the 5% direct deaths are wrong, and the people that say we should be counting all 100% who had COVID as deaths from COVID are... also wrong.
    - TameAntelope 6y ago
      We can use deaths-above-replacement (among other things) to determine how many more people died than normal from all causes, and then whittle down the obviously-not-from-contracting-covid deaths from there. The submission goes into very specific detail about how they did this, and they account for many of the potential confounders related to doing this analysis. I believe we can be much more precise than you're giving us credit for in determining if contracting COVID was the direct cause of someone's death, even with comorbidities. To be totally honest, when I see someone say, "we can't ever be totally sure" I nearly wholly discount that opinion, because it's very cheap to proffer, almost always true, and of very little value.
      - fastball 6y ago
        It is of immense value to say this when you have people in this very thread saying we might as well count everyone who had COVID as a death from COVID. Also one of us is confused, and I don't think it is me. From what I've gleaned from this article, the 900,000 figure is not (as you say) "determining if contracting COVID was the direct cause of someone's death", but rather trying to figure out how many people would have died if this had been a "normal" year, i.e. if we could go to a parallel universe and make COVID never exist. This is absolutely not the same thing, as such a scenario will also count deaths as a result of our response to the virus as a death "due to the virus". This is my impression as they seem to be including things like suicide (criteria "c") and people who died because people with actual COVID were taking up hospital beds (criteria "b").
- pixl97 6y ago
  Just wait till you hear about 'eggshell client' in a court of law.
_-david-_ 6y ago
You should be careful how far you go with that reasoning. If someone commits suicide due to loneliness during the lockdown does that mean covid killed that person? In an indirect way sure, covid kill him, but in my view it should not be counted as a covid death. Just taking excess deaths without differentiating these kinds of deaths is going to result in misleading statistics. It will cause people to think a person who did not have covid actually died from getting covid.
- kube-system 6y ago
  I think the person above meant: >"Would this person be alive were it not [for contracting] for COVID?"
anoncake 6y ago
Alive when? Right now? By that logic the Spanish Flu has retroactively become quite harmless. The important question is, how much earlier did someone die because of Covid. 2 weeks of life just aren't worth as much as 50 years.

fastball 6y ago

That's... exactly the point? Dying with COVID does not mean you would be alive today if you hadn't contracted COVID.

anigbrowl 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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?
    - fastball 6y ago
      A conclusion I find politically inconvenient? You have no idea what my politics are, please stop projecting. To answer your question though, no, they should not be lumped together because they are not the same thing and so the mitigations would've/could've/should've been different. In other words, lumping all these things together as "caused by COVID" is the opposite of useful. For example, you do better next time with deaths due to COVID in your system (category "a") by ramping up vaccination faster/better facemask policy/earlier lockdowns/etc. You can decrease category "b" by having more hospital beds / more healthcare capacity. You can reduce the deaths in category "c" (seemingly suicides) by having lockdowns that aren't up-and-down rollercoasters / better mental healthcare / etc. All of these, though being "due to COVID" should be handled very differently so it is counterproductive to lump them all together. Again, I think you might be projecting a bit here, because the only reason I can think of that you would want to lump them together is to push a political agenda. Not for any utilitarian reason.
xkjkls 6y ago
That's what he is attempting to imply is a massive overcounting in the data, but additional conditions that people point out as COVID deaths also having are mostly caused by COVID-19. Oh, they died of viral pneumonia after contracting COVID-19; pretty sure they would be in a different scenario had they not caught COVID-19.
- fastball 6y ago
  The problem is we don't know, and "both sides" don't seem willing to admit that. What I can guarantee is that of those 95% who died with COVID, some percentage of them would have died anyway, under almost identical circumstances, except without COVID. However, it is also true that some of those people would have lived if they hadn't contracted COVID, even though COVID was not the "direct" cause of death. For how much longer, who knows. But certainly not when they did. In other words: the people saying we should only be counting the 5% direct deaths are wrong, and the people that say we should be counting all 100% who had COVID as deaths from COVID are... also wrong.
  - TameAntelope 6y ago
    We can use deaths-above-replacement (among other things) to determine how many more people died than normal from all causes, and then whittle down the obviously-not-from-contracting-covid deaths from there. The submission goes into very specific detail about how they did this, and they account for many of the potential confounders related to doing this analysis. I believe we can be much more precise than you're giving us credit for in determining if contracting COVID was the direct cause of someone's death, even with comorbidities. To be totally honest, when I see someone say, "we can't ever be totally sure" I nearly wholly discount that opinion, because it's very cheap to proffer, almost always true, and of very little value.
    - fastball 6y ago
      It is of immense value to say this when you have people in this very thread saying we might as well count everyone who had COVID as a death from COVID. Also one of us is confused, and I don't think it is me. From what I've gleaned from this article, the 900,000 figure is not (as you say) "determining if contracting COVID was the direct cause of someone's death", but rather trying to figure out how many people would have died if this had been a "normal" year, i.e. if we could go to a parallel universe and make COVID never exist. This is absolutely not the same thing, as such a scenario will also count deaths as a result of our response to the virus as a death "due to the virus". This is my impression as they seem to be including things like suicide (criteria "c") and people who died because people with actual COVID were taking up hospital beds (criteria "b").
pixl97 6y ago
Just wait till you hear about 'eggshell client' in a court of law.

_-david-_ 6y ago

You should be careful how far you go with that reasoning. If someone commits suicide due to loneliness during the lockdown does that mean covid killed that person? In an indirect way sure, covid kill him, but in my view it should not be counted as a covid death. Just taking excess deaths without differentiating these kinds of deaths is going to result in misleading statistics. It will cause people to think a person who did not have covid actually died from getting covid.

kube-system 6y ago
I think the person above meant: >"Would this person be alive were it not [for contracting] for COVID?"

anoncake 6y ago

Alive when? Right now? By that logic the Spanish Flu has retroactively become quite harmless. The important question is, how much earlier did someone die because of Covid. 2 weeks of life just aren't worth as much as 50 years.