8 ms·

Excess deaths will need to become the standard statistic used to compare nations. Otherwise, we'll be debating "deaths FROM vs. deaths WITH COVID" and the diff

Excess deaths will need to become the standard statistic used to compare nations. Otherwise, we'll be debating "deaths FROM vs. deaths WITH COVID" and the differing statistical definitions from nation to nation. Moreover, is a death from lack of access to medical care due to the collapse of a medical system a COVID death? Is a death of despair from isolation and unemployment a COVID death? My sense is, when the pandemic is analyzed historically, "excess deaths" will be the only salient statistic in the literature.

donkeyd 5y ago
Unfortunately, it's still not a great comparison. Countries with lockdowns had less deaths from things like other illnesses, traffic accidents, et cetera.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  It's still a better metric than some guy on science.com effectively saying "I feel this number should be much higher"
- lordnacho 5y ago
  The point is to capture all those effects together. People who died in car crashes after 9/11 grounded all the planes have in some sense died from the terrorist attack, even though nothing at the scene suggests it. Same with covid, if someone dies from undiagnosed cancer due to lockdowns, they have been affected by covid in one way or another. That's what the "with or from" comment is about, we get past it by looking at the total effect.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    > Same with covid, if someone dies from undiagnosed cancer due to lockdowns, they have been affected by covid in one way or another. If a death would have been prevented by just not having lockdowns, then tallies that it's included in being high shouldn't be used to justify having lockdowns.
ekianjo 5y ago
> Excess deaths Excess deaths are not just due to COVID.
- bena 5y ago
  But the vast majority would be.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    That remains to be proven, since authorities have a large incentive to play the COVID-fear card.
    - bena 5y ago
      What incentive would that be?
- Jedd 5y ago
  > Excess deaths are not just due to COVID. Can you clarify what you mean by this? What kinds of things might excess deaths be attributable to, and to what rate / ratio would you expect?
  - zo1 5y ago
    Not OP. But it's becoming increasingly clear (to me, at least) that data about reality has been lost. And no amount of "statistics", "modelling" and accounting for confounding variables will get that data back. This applies to masks, lockdowns, vaccine effectiveness and treatment effectiveness. Even if we do get a reasonable set of that data back via statistical means, I personally wouldn't trust it. Too many things weren't tracked, people had incentives to fudge numbers, data-integrity and duplication issues, etc. As much as I know there are lots of incredibly smart and educated people working on this, I see most of this as people running around throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks, some hoping to get paid for it, others hoping to save lives. Likewise for your question. We simply don't have data or knowledge about what people did or how they behaved differently that might have caused a non-covid death to be reasonably attributed to covid. Suicide rates, anti-social behavior of children not seeing people's faces, people hiding pro-active tests, dentists visits, hiding from leaving the house and getting depression, the list is huge and specifically unconstrained.
saalweachter 5y ago
Excess deaths - and maybe a QALY-loss estimate - are the only way to "score" the pandemic and different countries' response to it, but I suspect there will be a lot of writing on "actual COVID deaths" versus "deaths from hospitals deferring treatment due to COVID surges" versus knock-on deaths attributable to the pandemic, lockdowns, unemployment. We're getting so much interesting data out of this pandemic, both biological and sociological. Which public health measures were effective? Which ones were acceptable to different populations, and why? How does misinformation flow? How well can governments control the narrative? There are going to be PhD theses built on this for the next ten, twenty years.
- jeromegv 5y ago
  Deaths from hospitals differing treatment are also a great assessment of COVID impact on society. If COVID hardly hit a region, then they didn't need to delay surgeries. If COVID ravaged through the country, likely the hospitals were impacted and had to delay surgeries. All excess death is relevant.
  - q1w2 5y ago
    Right, but it's important to distinguish excess deaths caused by covid and covid hostpital impacts vs excess deaths caused by lockdown behavioral changes. Lockdowns and mandates are something a region can instrument independently, and we now have lots of data to assess the benefits/impact of different degrees and types of lockdowns and mandates in jurisdictions that were impacted by the same number of new covid cases.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tinus_hn 5y ago
And then if it turns out that lockdowns actually cause deaths due to youth suicides, they’ll be swept under the rug and be used to excuse more lockdowns.
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  An inconvenient truth. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/youth-suicide-attempts-soared-during-pandemic-cdc-report-says-n1270463 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/youth-suicide-attempts-...
loudmax 5y ago
The Economist's excess death tracker is online here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... The article was last updated in October 2021, but the data in the charts is current insofar as it's available. Their methodology is posted on Github here: https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-tracker https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-track... They get their data from the World Mortality Dataset (https://github.com/akarlinsky/world_mortality https://github.com/akarlinsky/world_mortality). They claim their modeled baselines fit a linear trend for year, to account for long-term increases or decreases in mortality, and a fixed effect for each week or month up to February 2020. I haven't dug into the details of the methodology but it appears very sensible. Of course it's very dependent on overall mortality rates having been accurately reported to begin with. If the Economist keeps this this chart going long enough, we should expect that in countries worst affected by covid, future mortality rates will fall below the expected baseline. The simple (if somewhat morbid) logic being that in those places the most vulnerable people will have already died.
- tersers 5y ago
  You are in luck, they just updated it today.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  It doesn't sound like anyone really knows how many people exist or are born or die in India, so it's not clear that the Economist's attractive presentation of the data could have any real basis in India, without a primary data source.
- nonethewiser 5y ago
  Evidently the underlying dataset doesn't include China.
- tarunupaday 5y ago
  I do not see any data about India
  - 5y ago
DanHulton 5y ago
I've taken to calling them "Pandemic Deaths", ie deaths caused by the pandemic, regardless of specific source. Makes it a little harder to split hairs.
- the_doctah 5y ago
  Then that should include suicides from lockdown inflicted mental distress
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    You mean it should include a negative adjustment for the fact that suicides fell in 2020 in the U.S.? https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR016.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR016.pdf
    - the_doctah 5y ago
      >Rates for persons aged 10–34 were higher in 2020 than in 2019, whereas rates for persons aged 35 and over were lower. I highlighted the important part.
      - jeffbee 5y ago
        > only the 5% increase for those aged 25–34 (from 17.5 to 18.3) was significant. Hope that helps. It's super weird that people try to focus on this when the larger failure of policy is that car crash deaths were up more than 18%, resulting in far more absolute deaths. You are talking about a change of 320 deaths while the car crash increment was 3140 additional deaths.
  - xadhominemx 5y ago
    Australia had a severe nationwide lockdown and suffered negative excess mortality in 2020
  - flerchin 5y ago
    It does
robertoandred 5y ago
Excess deaths per capita, please.
naasking 5y ago
> Is a death of despair from isolation and unemployment a COVID death? Since that's driven by the response to COVID, I certainly don't think it should be, because the response is a choice which differs meaningful from a death by COVID infection or comorbidity. Teasing apart the deaths directly caused by COVID from those that indirectly led from our response to COVID is important for making these decisions in the future.

donkeyd 5y ago

Unfortunately, it's still not a great comparison. Countries with lockdowns had less deaths from things like other illnesses, traffic accidents, et cetera.

mohanmcgeek 5y ago
It's still a better metric than some guy on science.com effectively saying "I feel this number should be much higher"
lordnacho 5y ago
The point is to capture all those effects together. People who died in car crashes after 9/11 grounded all the planes have in some sense died from the terrorist attack, even though nothing at the scene suggests it. Same with covid, if someone dies from undiagnosed cancer due to lockdowns, they have been affected by covid in one way or another. That's what the "with or from" comment is about, we get past it by looking at the total effect.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  > Same with covid, if someone dies from undiagnosed cancer due to lockdowns, they have been affected by covid in one way or another. If a death would have been prevented by just not having lockdowns, then tallies that it's included in being high shouldn't be used to justify having lockdowns.

ekianjo 5y ago

> Excess deaths Excess deaths are not just due to COVID.

bena 5y ago
But the vast majority would be.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  That remains to be proven, since authorities have a large incentive to play the COVID-fear card.
  - bena 5y ago
    What incentive would that be?
Jedd 5y ago
> Excess deaths are not just due to COVID. Can you clarify what you mean by this? What kinds of things might excess deaths be attributable to, and to what rate / ratio would you expect?
- zo1 5y ago
  Not OP. But it's becoming increasingly clear (to me, at least) that data about reality has been lost. And no amount of "statistics", "modelling" and accounting for confounding variables will get that data back. This applies to masks, lockdowns, vaccine effectiveness and treatment effectiveness. Even if we do get a reasonable set of that data back via statistical means, I personally wouldn't trust it. Too many things weren't tracked, people had incentives to fudge numbers, data-integrity and duplication issues, etc. As much as I know there are lots of incredibly smart and educated people working on this, I see most of this as people running around throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks, some hoping to get paid for it, others hoping to save lives. Likewise for your question. We simply don't have data or knowledge about what people did or how they behaved differently that might have caused a non-covid death to be reasonably attributed to covid. Suicide rates, anti-social behavior of children not seeing people's faces, people hiding pro-active tests, dentists visits, hiding from leaving the house and getting depression, the list is huge and specifically unconstrained.

saalweachter 5y ago

Excess deaths - and maybe a QALY-loss estimate - are the only way to "score" the pandemic and different countries' response to it, but I suspect there will be a lot of writing on "actual COVID deaths" versus "deaths from hospitals deferring treatment due to COVID surges" versus knock-on deaths attributable to the pandemic, lockdowns, unemployment. We're getting so much interesting data out of this pandemic, both biological and sociological. Which public health measures were effective? Which ones were acceptable to different populations, and why? How does misinformation flow? How well can governments control the narrative? There are going to be PhD theses built on this for the next ten, twenty years.

jeromegv 5y ago
Deaths from hospitals differing treatment are also a great assessment of COVID impact on society. If COVID hardly hit a region, then they didn't need to delay surgeries. If COVID ravaged through the country, likely the hospitals were impacted and had to delay surgeries. All excess death is relevant.
- q1w2 5y ago
  Right, but it's important to distinguish excess deaths caused by covid and covid hostpital impacts vs excess deaths caused by lockdown behavioral changes. Lockdowns and mandates are something a region can instrument independently, and we now have lots of data to assess the benefits/impact of different degrees and types of lockdowns and mandates in jurisdictions that were impacted by the same number of new covid cases.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tinus_hn 5y ago

And then if it turns out that lockdowns actually cause deaths due to youth suicides, they’ll be swept under the rug and be used to excuse more lockdowns.

tinus_hn 5y ago
An inconvenient truth. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/youth-suicide-attempts-soared-during-pandemic-cdc-report-says-n1270463 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/youth-suicide-attempts-...

loudmax 5y ago

The Economist's excess death tracker is online here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... The article was last updated in October 2021, but the data in the charts is current insofar as it's available. Their methodology is posted on Github here: https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-tracker https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-track... They get their data from the World Mortality Dataset (https://github.com/akarlinsky/world_mortality https://github.com/akarlinsky/world_mortality). They claim their modeled baselines fit a linear trend for year, to account for long-term increases or decreases in mortality, and a fixed effect for each week or month up to February 2020. I haven't dug into the details of the methodology but it appears very sensible. Of course it's very dependent on overall mortality rates having been accurately reported to begin with. If the Economist keeps this this chart going long enough, we should expect that in countries worst affected by covid, future mortality rates will fall below the expected baseline. The simple (if somewhat morbid) logic being that in those places the most vulnerable people will have already died.

tersers 5y ago
You are in luck, they just updated it today.
jeffbee 5y ago
It doesn't sound like anyone really knows how many people exist or are born or die in India, so it's not clear that the Economist's attractive presentation of the data could have any real basis in India, without a primary data source.
nonethewiser 5y ago
Evidently the underlying dataset doesn't include China.
tarunupaday 5y ago
I do not see any data about India
- 5y ago

DanHulton 5y ago

I've taken to calling them "Pandemic Deaths", ie deaths caused by the pandemic, regardless of specific source. Makes it a little harder to split hairs.

the_doctah 5y ago
Then that should include suicides from lockdown inflicted mental distress
- jeffbee 5y ago
  You mean it should include a negative adjustment for the fact that suicides fell in 2020 in the U.S.? https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR016.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR016.pdf
  - the_doctah 5y ago
    >Rates for persons aged 10–34 were higher in 2020 than in 2019, whereas rates for persons aged 35 and over were lower. I highlighted the important part.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      > only the 5% increase for those aged 25–34 (from 17.5 to 18.3) was significant. Hope that helps. It's super weird that people try to focus on this when the larger failure of policy is that car crash deaths were up more than 18%, resulting in far more absolute deaths. You are talking about a change of 320 deaths while the car crash increment was 3140 additional deaths.
- xadhominemx 5y ago
  Australia had a severe nationwide lockdown and suffered negative excess mortality in 2020
- flerchin 5y ago
  It does

robertoandred 5y ago

Excess deaths per capita, please.

naasking 5y ago

> Is a death of despair from isolation and unemployment a COVID death? Since that's driven by the response to COVID, I certainly don't think it should be, because the response is a choice which differs meaningful from a death by COVID infection or comorbidity. Teasing apart the deaths directly caused by COVID from those that indirectly led from our response to COVID is important for making these decisions in the future.