6 ms·

How many Covid-related? How many drug overdoses? How many suicides?

by freyr 5y ago

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
This seems like what-about-ism. You could look these numbers up easily on the CDCs death data, and then you could formulate a coherent thought. Instead, it seems like you're just trying to derail the conversation with as little effort as possible.
- freyr 5y ago
  No, it’s not what-about-ism. It’s a suggestion that the two numbers being thrown around are accompanied by some bare minimum of detail to have a meaningful conversation. OP made the link to Covid-19, which seems very plausible, but it’s not clear if they have facts to support this or it’s just a guess. Suicides and overdoses are two of the leading causes of death among young Americans. It’s irresponsible to discuss a 40% increase in deaths and imply this is all Covid-19 without any evidence.
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  - halpert 5y ago
    Asking someone to look up some numbers for you to complete your random hypothesis isn't exactly constructive either way.
    - deleted 5y ago
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    - Zigurd 5y ago
      It's not just lazy, it's derailing.
      - freyr 5y ago
        What exactly am I derailing? An unsubstantiated claim made by OP that contradicts details provided in the parent article? “Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths … there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319 … the moving average of daily deaths from COVID-19 is less than half of what it was a year ago” “Lazy” is not reading the article. And if “derailing” an unfounded assumption to better understand these deaths is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
      - justinmcp 5y ago
        Covid is real, vaccines are good, etc, etc. But why has everyone switched like thi? Freyr is correct. The OP put forward the proposition, it's up to them to provide data that makes the case.
    - freyr 5y ago
      The random hypothesis was made by OP, who inferred that the 45% increase in deaths is due to Covid-19. I would guess a lot of that 45% is due to Covid, but how much would be a guess, and I suspect OP is just guessing too. Overdoses are historically one of the leading causes of death among people in this age range, and we’re also setting records for overdose deaths this year [0], but that gets no almost coverage compared to Covid. I think it’s reasonable to keep in mind that overdoses could also be contributing to that 45% uptick, unless we have evidence to the contrary. [0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/opioid-crisis-2021-insys-kapoor-sackler-purdue-record-deaths/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/opioid-crisis-202...
      - hamburglar 5y ago
        A really useful exercise you can do for yourself (I did it) is to download the CDC total US deaths data and plot each of the past 7 years as lines on an x axis that goes from week 1 to week 52 of the year. Keeping in mind that this graph does not take cause of death into account, you will note two striking features: 1) the death curves for the 5 years up to and including 2019 are extremely similar, with the exception that you can tell they are overall slightly elevated one winter by a particularly bad flu season (I think it was end of 2017 / beginning of 2018). And 2) 2020 and 2021 have very large Covid-surge-shaped excess death bumps that imply an incredibly strong correlation between Covid and the deviation in deaths from “normal” years. And if you find the delta between a “normal” year and the ones with the Covid-shaped bumps in it, it matches up extremely closely with the numbers CDC is also reporting as “Covid-related deaths.” In order to say that a significant number of these are drug and suicide deaths, you’d also have to be positing a theory that drug and suicide deaths are also for some reason elevating themselves in precise timing with the Covid surges. I’m not going to claim this is impossible, but it does seem extremely far fetched to me, and I suspect seeing the data laid out like I describe would probably make you abandon your theory. (Edit: using ‘your theory’ colloquially here. I know you havent posited any specific theory here, but your line of reasoning and skepticism is clear) Edit to add: I actually don’t doubt that excess drug and suicide deaths are partially responsible for general elevated death numbers. Lockdowns, isolation, job losses, etc are all certainly driving some of this. But these are slow and steady drivers, not ones that rise and fall precisely with the number of Covid cases, which takes me to the conclusion that they are in the noise compared to Covid itself. (And the CDC death categorizations happen to agree with that)
    - ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 5y ago
      He's asking someone for numbers that prove their own hypothesis. Why is that making you sweat so much?
  - cbsmith 5y ago
    The leading cause of death for young people is injuries (https://www.wthr.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/state-reports-less-than-10-percent-of-available-icu-beds-staff-capacity-hospitals/531-fa31513c-fce9-42bc-bfe6-90aa4730357a https://www.wthr.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/state-r...). However, injuries are far more likely to be life threatening if health care resources are scarce, as they have become in Indiana. This is precisely the challenge presented by a pandemic. That's precisely why the lethality of the pandemic virus is largely irrelevant. The threat from a pandemic is the overwhelming of health care resources. So it's kind of splitting hairs to worry about whether the cause of death is COVID-19 or not. Either way, it's the pandemic. There's a literally historic shift in the death rate among the young that correlates very well with the the availability of care... and we have the people working in the hospitals saying that this is the underlying problem. Maybe young people have had a 40% increase in deaths from injury, from suicides, from overdoses, or from tipping over vending machines. The specific COD isn't the problem.
  - diordiderot 5y ago
    My little brother died this year. He was electrocuted and his heart stopped immediately. You can keep someones brain alive with cpr for around thirty minutes but they didn't have any available first responders (they have defibs) because of covid calls. They showed up an hour later. Does he count as a covid death.
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- bparsons 5y ago
  The biggest portion of this growth is almost certainly being driven by opioid poisoning. This was growing quickly pre-pandemic, but has skyrocketed in the last two years.
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  - mike00632 5y ago
    "almost certainly"... So without evidence you conclude that young people are dying at a higher rate NOT because of the deadly global pandemic. QED.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  If you say so, we also have estimate the threat of the disease by excess death.
kayodelycaon 5y ago
I looked up the information in a previous thread. For the United States, using the most conservative Covid numbers, they outweighs these by at least a factor of 5. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29706964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29706964
- freyr 5y ago
  Do you have a link or source? Overdose and suicide are two of the leading causes of death among young people. If Covid deaths were 5X higher, we’d see a much much larger overall increase than 40%. Edit: Your numbers are for the total population, not young people. The death rates and leading causes of death are drastically different between young people and the general population.
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  - timeinput 5y ago
    Do you have a link or source to support your hypothesis? It should be trivial to provide it.
    - freyr 5y ago
      OP says deaths among people 20-40 are up 45%, and inferred that this is due to Covid. That’s the hypothesis being made here. And it contradicts what’s in the parent article, namely that many of these deaths are from causes other than Covid: “The CDC weekly death counts, which reflect the information on death certificates and so have a lag of up to eight weeks or longer, show that for the week ending Nov. 6, there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319.” I’m suggesting that other leading causes of death among people in this age range could possibly be up this year, and contributing to this uptick, perhaps by a significant amount. For example, in SF, the number of people in this age range dying of overdoses far outnumbers the people in this age range dying of Covid. Nationally, we are setting record numbers of overdoses, driven mostly by fentanyl. ”In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in November that more than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, May 2020 to April 2021, with about three-quarters of those deaths involving opioids — a national record.” [0] [0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/opioid-crisis-2021-insys-kapoor-sackler-purdue-record-deaths/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/opioid-crisis-202... [1] https://vtdigger.org/2022/01/02/opioid-overdose-deaths-poised-to-break-vermont-record-set-in-2020/ https://vtdigger.org/2022/01/02/opioid-overdose-deaths-poise... [2] https://www.wfmj.com/story/45563074/mercer-county-sees-recordbreaking-number-of-overdose-deaths-in-2021 https://www.wfmj.com/story/45563074/mercer-county-sees-recor...
honkdaddy 5y ago
Scott Alexander actually wrote about COVID related suicides and why they haven't risen nearly as much as one might have expected. https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/why-didnt-suicides-rise-during-covid/ https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/why-didnt-suicides-rise...
causi 5y ago
How many drug overdoses and suicides are directly related to covid and its impact on society, and by extension our failure to stop it before it became unstoppable?

How many Covid-related? How many drug overdoses? How many suicides?

by freyr 5y ago

How many Covid-related? How many drug overdoses? How many suicides?

This seems like what-about-ism. You could look these numbers up easily on the CDCs death data, and then you could formulate a coherent thought. Instead, it seems like you're just trying to derail the conversation with as little effort as possible.

freyr 5y ago
No, it’s not what-about-ism. It’s a suggestion that the two numbers being thrown around are accompanied by some bare minimum of detail to have a meaningful conversation. OP made the link to Covid-19, which seems very plausible, but it’s not clear if they have facts to support this or it’s just a guess. Suicides and overdoses are two of the leading causes of death among young Americans. It’s irresponsible to discuss a 40% increase in deaths and imply this is all Covid-19 without any evidence.
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- halpert 5y ago
  Asking someone to look up some numbers for you to complete your random hypothesis isn't exactly constructive either way.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Zigurd 5y ago
    It's not just lazy, it's derailing.
    - freyr 5y ago
      What exactly am I derailing? An unsubstantiated claim made by OP that contradicts details provided in the parent article? “Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths … there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319 … the moving average of daily deaths from COVID-19 is less than half of what it was a year ago” “Lazy” is not reading the article. And if “derailing” an unfounded assumption to better understand these deaths is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
    - justinmcp 5y ago
      Covid is real, vaccines are good, etc, etc. But why has everyone switched like thi? Freyr is correct. The OP put forward the proposition, it's up to them to provide data that makes the case.
  - freyr 5y ago
    The random hypothesis was made by OP, who inferred that the 45% increase in deaths is due to Covid-19. I would guess a lot of that 45% is due to Covid, but how much would be a guess, and I suspect OP is just guessing too. Overdoses are historically one of the leading causes of death among people in this age range, and we’re also setting records for overdose deaths this year [0], but that gets no almost coverage compared to Covid. I think it’s reasonable to keep in mind that overdoses could also be contributing to that 45% uptick, unless we have evidence to the contrary. [0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/opioid-crisis-2021-insys-kapoor-sackler-purdue-record-deaths/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/opioid-crisis-202...
    - hamburglar 5y ago
      A really useful exercise you can do for yourself (I did it) is to download the CDC total US deaths data and plot each of the past 7 years as lines on an x axis that goes from week 1 to week 52 of the year. Keeping in mind that this graph does not take cause of death into account, you will note two striking features: 1) the death curves for the 5 years up to and including 2019 are extremely similar, with the exception that you can tell they are overall slightly elevated one winter by a particularly bad flu season (I think it was end of 2017 / beginning of 2018). And 2) 2020 and 2021 have very large Covid-surge-shaped excess death bumps that imply an incredibly strong correlation between Covid and the deviation in deaths from “normal” years. And if you find the delta between a “normal” year and the ones with the Covid-shaped bumps in it, it matches up extremely closely with the numbers CDC is also reporting as “Covid-related deaths.” In order to say that a significant number of these are drug and suicide deaths, you’d also have to be positing a theory that drug and suicide deaths are also for some reason elevating themselves in precise timing with the Covid surges. I’m not going to claim this is impossible, but it does seem extremely far fetched to me, and I suspect seeing the data laid out like I describe would probably make you abandon your theory. (Edit: using ‘your theory’ colloquially here. I know you havent posited any specific theory here, but your line of reasoning and skepticism is clear) Edit to add: I actually don’t doubt that excess drug and suicide deaths are partially responsible for general elevated death numbers. Lockdowns, isolation, job losses, etc are all certainly driving some of this. But these are slow and steady drivers, not ones that rise and fall precisely with the number of Covid cases, which takes me to the conclusion that they are in the noise compared to Covid itself. (And the CDC death categorizations happen to agree with that)
  - ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 5y ago
    He's asking someone for numbers that prove their own hypothesis. Why is that making you sweat so much?
- cbsmith 5y ago
  The leading cause of death for young people is injuries (https://www.wthr.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/state-reports-less-than-10-percent-of-available-icu-beds-staff-capacity-hospitals/531-fa31513c-fce9-42bc-bfe6-90aa4730357a https://www.wthr.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/state-r...). However, injuries are far more likely to be life threatening if health care resources are scarce, as they have become in Indiana. This is precisely the challenge presented by a pandemic. That's precisely why the lethality of the pandemic virus is largely irrelevant. The threat from a pandemic is the overwhelming of health care resources. So it's kind of splitting hairs to worry about whether the cause of death is COVID-19 or not. Either way, it's the pandemic. There's a literally historic shift in the death rate among the young that correlates very well with the the availability of care... and we have the people working in the hospitals saying that this is the underlying problem. Maybe young people have had a 40% increase in deaths from injury, from suicides, from overdoses, or from tipping over vending machines. The specific COD isn't the problem.
- diordiderot 5y ago
  My little brother died this year. He was electrocuted and his heart stopped immediately. You can keep someones brain alive with cpr for around thirty minutes but they didn't have any available first responders (they have defibs) because of covid calls. They showed up an hour later. Does he count as a covid death.
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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bparsons 5y ago
The biggest portion of this growth is almost certainly being driven by opioid poisoning. This was growing quickly pre-pandemic, but has skyrocketed in the last two years.
- deleted 5y ago
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- mike00632 5y ago
  "almost certainly"... So without evidence you conclude that young people are dying at a higher rate NOT because of the deadly global pandemic. QED.
raxxorrax 5y ago
If you say so, we also have estimate the threat of the disease by excess death.

kayodelycaon 5y ago

I looked up the information in a previous thread. For the United States, using the most conservative Covid numbers, they outweighs these by at least a factor of 5. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29706964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29706964

freyr 5y ago
Do you have a link or source? Overdose and suicide are two of the leading causes of death among young people. If Covid deaths were 5X higher, we’d see a much much larger overall increase than 40%. Edit: Your numbers are for the total population, not young people. The death rates and leading causes of death are drastically different between young people and the general population.
- deleted 5y ago
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- timeinput 5y ago
  Do you have a link or source to support your hypothesis? It should be trivial to provide it.
  - freyr 5y ago
    OP says deaths among people 20-40 are up 45%, and inferred that this is due to Covid. That’s the hypothesis being made here. And it contradicts what’s in the parent article, namely that many of these deaths are from causes other than Covid: “The CDC weekly death counts, which reflect the information on death certificates and so have a lag of up to eight weeks or longer, show that for the week ending Nov. 6, there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319.” I’m suggesting that other leading causes of death among people in this age range could possibly be up this year, and contributing to this uptick, perhaps by a significant amount. For example, in SF, the number of people in this age range dying of overdoses far outnumbers the people in this age range dying of Covid. Nationally, we are setting record numbers of overdoses, driven mostly by fentanyl. ”In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in November that more than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, May 2020 to April 2021, with about three-quarters of those deaths involving opioids — a national record.” [0] [0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/opioid-crisis-2021-insys-kapoor-sackler-purdue-record-deaths/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/opioid-crisis-202... [1] https://vtdigger.org/2022/01/02/opioid-overdose-deaths-poised-to-break-vermont-record-set-in-2020/ https://vtdigger.org/2022/01/02/opioid-overdose-deaths-poise... [2] https://www.wfmj.com/story/45563074/mercer-county-sees-recordbreaking-number-of-overdose-deaths-in-2021 https://www.wfmj.com/story/45563074/mercer-county-sees-recor...

honkdaddy 5y ago

Scott Alexander actually wrote about COVID related suicides and why they haven't risen nearly as much as one might have expected. https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/why-didnt-suicides-rise-during-covid/ https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/why-didnt-suicides-rise...

causi 5y ago

How many drug overdoses and suicides are directly related to covid and its impact on society, and by extension our failure to stop it before it became unstoppable?