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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 mo

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?
  - fastball 5y 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.

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?
- fastball 5y 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.