5 ms·
>This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist. Every time I see such claims, I still cringe at the thought of figurin
by kspacewalk2 5y ago
>This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist.
Every time I see such claims, I still cringe at the thought of figuring out what it actually means. The details are gory, and can be summarized simplistically by saying "death with COVID ≠ death from COVID". In other words, figuring out true disease toll is a rather ambiguous problem, as stated.
Can someone point me to a reference where this subject is rigorously treated, without skipping over the gore, but is still accessible to a non-expert (say, to someone who has undergrad-level understanding of health stats)? Could be a paper, a meta study, a blog post, whatever.
Like with this estimate, for example, I'd want to know if it's 10-12 million people who died within X days of a positive PCR test for COVID, or something less naive.
- bart_spoon 5y agoI'm fairly certain they use excess deaths, not necessary "deaths with COVID".
- zuminator 5y agoIt has nothing to do with PCR tests. The Economist based their estimate on a ML analysis based on excess mortality estimates. [0] https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-the-economist-global-excess-deaths-model https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-the-economist-globa... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
- munificent 5y agoThe easy way to get a rough answer here is simply to compare the death rate from the same time of year a couple of years back. Assuming no other events that would cause a large swing in death rate, most of the variance can likely be explained by COVID.
- nitrogen 5y agoAssuming no other events that would cause a large swing in death rate It's not obvious this is a tenable assumption, though. Depression and isolation can also increase mortality for things not directly related to depression and isolation, for example.
- Ensorceled 5y ago> "death with COVID ≠ death from COVID" My favourite take on this: "I have Type 1 diabetes. I am healthy enough to run ultramarathons. If I get attacked by a bear & the ICU has trouble managing my blood sugar while caring for my bear attack wounds...and I die... the bear is the cause of my death. "[1] But it's irrelevant since these meta studies always use excess deaths over average because of reportings issues (both logistical and political). Start here https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid [1] https://twitter.com/cadiulus/status/1300408867717812231 https://twitter.com/cadiulus/status/1300408867717812231
- marcosdumay 5y ago> But it's irrelevant since these meta studies always use excess deaths over average because of reportings issues (both logistical and political). Exactly, deciding the cause of a single death is a messy complex task that doesn't have correct answers. Deciding the number of deaths due to a cause is much simpler and can be done most of the times.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rmk 5y agoExcess mortality is a rough proxy of death from COVID. In the bear attack example, the proximal cause of death is the Bear attack, and diabetes is a comorbidity. The death of the diabetic arose out of complications stemming from the bear attack, so it's reasonable to categorize it as a bear attack death. I'm assuming that you are arguing that from the excess deaths standpoint, death from x vs. death with x both count as death from x, to which I agree. I also think it's a reasonable characterization.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoThis could be solved if we used tagging in the data. E.g. everything should be tagged that played a role. Bear, ICU skill, T1D, etc.