9 ms·

CMI says 2022 had the worst second half for mortality since 2010

75 points by wanderingmind 4y ago

pjkundert 4y ago
“… to 7.8% higher for ages 20-44.” Just slipped that in there; nothing to see here, move along, move along. I don’t know how many standard deviations away from normal this is, but it’s apparently a lot: — once in centuries — a lot. But I’m sure it’s nothing. And absolutely sure it’s not … the thing. Cause it’s not.
- eddsh1994 4y ago
  > “once in centuries” a lot. This is not a genuine quote from the article, emphasis is by OP
- cma 4y ago
  > Mortality for 2022 as a whole was [..] 7.8% lower than in 2020
  - eddsh1994 4y ago
    > There is a striking difference in how mortality rates in 2022 compare to 2019 at different ages – ranging from 2.5% higher for ages 75-84 to 7.8% higher for ages 20-44. You quoted the wrong part.
    - cma 4y ago
      75-84 year olds are more vaccinated ("88.9% of eligible adult care home residents" are vaccinated), and many with vulnerable conditions were already killed off earlier than otherwise by covid. If we can get those other 11.1% to chose the vax, maybe we can get those elderly excess numbers closer to 2019. Suicide is the leading cause of death under 45: brexit's negative impact on the economy and the 2022 war crash might be part of the story there, but I'm not sure if that was where the increase was. If we could have had everyone lock down just 1.5 weeks earlier on the initial wave and then done everything the same we could have prevented large amounts of covid's human and economic impact and made it to vaccine land without as much damage.
      - hammock 4y ago
        >Suicide is the leading cause of death under 45 What’s your source? Data I’ve seen says that’s not the case anymore. It’s overdose: the leading cause for people ages 18-45 would be unintentional drug overdose due to synthetic opioids. That number would exceed the second highest leading cause of death (suicide in 2020 and COVID-19 in 2021.) Source: CDC https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2022/10/02/fact-check-fentanyl-leading-cause-of-death-among-adults/65417990007/ https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/202...
        jackvalentine 4y ago
        The article is about the UK, not the U.S.
        hammock 4y ago
        Is there a source for the UK then? In the UK in 2021 there were 84.4 overdose deaths per million compared to 105 suicides per million that’s across all age groups. Not sure what the 18-45 demo looks like but it would be much closer, if not flipped
      - ed25519FUUU 4y ago
        Nothing is free. Locking people down earlier or for longer could easily cause more excess death for young people.
        ben_w 4y ago
        Earlier lockdown would've meant shorter lockdown. There are always trade-offs, but sometimes there are also synergies.
- bobkazamakis 4y ago
  Definitely not. All of our yutes have plenty of hope for the future, and those deaths of despair are actually evidence of how capitalism is working very well.
  - primeblue 4y ago
    [dead]
- myko 4y ago
  It is likely covid-19 related, yes. Not vaccine related, which I think you may be implying. Excess deaths have been climbing since covid kicked off: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid; we're not doing a good job determining the effects of long covid.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - myko 4y ago
      The vaccine technology used was studied for 20+ years. Billions of doses have been administered. They're safe. This antivax nonsense should be banned from the site. Just read your own article: "Any link to Covid vaccines has been ruled out on the basis of international evidence demonstrating their safety in pregnancy, but PHS confirmed that it had not checked the vaccination status of any of the mothers affected. ... Since April 2022, the neonatal mortality rate has been falling and - between May 2022 and October 2022, the most recent month for which data is available - has been consistently lower than expected when compared against the pre-pandemic averages." The children in the article were too young to be vaccinated. The more likely explanation is either the kids got covid, or received subpar care due to staffing shortages caused by covid. Please stop spreading antivax sentiment.
  - notthevax 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    Factually, the majority of excess death is no longer COVID-attributed. We’re either missing another modality by which COVID kills — or there’s another cause. That’s according to the OECD mortality figures. https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/covid-mortality.png https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/covid-mortality.png We know from re-analysis of the mRNA trials that their major injury rate is at least 1 in 800. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYR1wz-Cf_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYR1wz-Cf_M And just coincidentally, 1/800 times the 500M doses in the US is very close to what a 10% increase in mortality (blue line) would be for two years — about 300,000 deaths a year. But I’m sure that it’s a coincidence that our non-COVID-attributed excess death matches the serious injury rate of mRNA vaccines and begins around the same period (purple line going below black line in 21Q2).
walterbell 4y ago
Some US data, https://infonomena.substack.com/p/whered-all-the-workers-go https://infonomena.substack.com/p/whered-all-the-workers-go > In 2021, however, group life payments exploded by 20.7% over the five year average and by 15% over the acute pandemic year of 2020. Why would healthy young and middle-age people suddenly begin dying in large numbers in 2021 when they’d navigated 2020 with relative success? > ... In 2020, the vulnerable died of Covid at unusually high rates. In 2021 and 2022, Covid continued its assault, but the young, middle-aged, and healthy also died in aberrantly high numbers of something else.
- csomar 4y ago
  Is this something only happening in the UK or are other countries also experiencing this? Can this be linked to the coronavirus or a previous coronavirus infection? Not fan of conspiracy theories but could this be why China was quite opposed to opening up?
  - lumost 4y ago
    The lockdowns and other societal effects of Covid could also play a role. Alcoholism is way up, along with other substance abuse issues. Shutting down office culture removed a substantial fixture of individuals social lives. Rather than supporting wfh - many companies forced new hires to move to cities just to work in tiny apartments where they know no one. It’ll take ages for the statisticians, sociologists, and economists to sort out exactly what was happening between 2020 and 20XX when society settles down.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      That leftmost X is like the most crushing single digit replacement possible, haha.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > other societal effects of Covid could also play a role There’s also a large section of the population that’s now generally anti-vax and anti-medicine. (I’ve seen it in my family.)
rcme 4y ago
Governments have really dropped the ball in terms of de-escalating the perception of covid. Once the vaccines were available, and it was clear that Covid has become endemic, governments should have made it abundantly clear that the disease should not be treated any differently than the cold or flu. Instead, we are seeing the effects of prolonged fear over covid. For instance, child ICUs were full as RSV ravaged classrooms filled with children with weak immune systems. Multiple people I know have had extremely important medical appointments, e.g. the first OB visit during pregnancy, that they had to push back because of a Covid infection. The government should be telling people that the risk / reward tradeoff of such a decision is not worth it.
haldujai 4y ago
In my opinion (physician/radiologist) we're going to see higher mortality and health care costs for a while as we are just starting to feel the effects of covid/prolonged lockdowns on missed screening. As one example, at my large tertiary care centre we were doing around 80% less screening mammograms during the pandemic and we are seeing ~2-3x more females presenting with locally advanced breast cancer than we were pre-covid (I believe the breast division is publishing a study on this in Ontario). Locally advanced at presentation means you now also need systemic therapy (chemo) with its complications and possibly an axillary lymph node dissection (fair bit of morbidity with this) instead of what would have been a lumpectomy+radiation+sentinal node biopsy. Beyond the direct patient morbidity and mortality effects (higher rates of metastatic disease and death go hand in hand with advanced presentations of all cancer) the strain on the system will mean we're busy/spending on dealing with these very sick patients that will undoubtedly impact other care we can provide (only so many $ and human resources to go around) and there will be some cascading effect (how much, I'm not sure). It will take 3-5 years to fully capture what the human and financial cost of all of this would have been, versus what was saved with prolonged lockdowns (particularly post delta when Covid stopped becoming very deadly).
- gandalfgeek 4y ago
  The "COVID deniers", as they were labeled, (think people like Jay Bhattacharya, Scott Atlas et al), warned about all of this. They presented the tradeoffs and probabilities on both sides. But they were completely shut down without debate, in the name of "following the science." They were shut down in concerted fashion-- by govt, by social media (under govt coercion, or ideological pull), by legacy media. And now the truth is coming out, and there is still no accountability for the "beat COVID at all costs" proponents. If we are to prevent this the next time a pandemic rolls through the world (and it will), there needs to be a society-level post-mortem, and not a blameless one.
  - lettergram 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - sdwr 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
college_physics 4y ago
Some people diligently try to make sense of what happened but I have the distinct sense the public simply wants to move on and wipe the pandemic from memory as there are more pressing 'fights'. Except viruses have no brain, no hurt feelings, no divisive politics, just their inexorable multiplication logic. The writing is on the wall.
- TrispusAttucks 4y ago
  Never forget what happened. That's how history repeats.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Well it would be great if people were pushing for reforms that actually would prevent these problems (basically however you’d define them) from happening again. Namely: TESTING so we have actual data to make decisions with, immediately and continuously. We were completely flying blind when big, big decisions had to be made. It’s a stupid argument to ask whether the blind decisions we made were right or wrong when we could focus on not being blind next time.
    - college_physics 4y ago
      I think we also need to have a global alert system that somehow works independently on any political or other friction. It should organized to be resilient, tamper proof and transparent. If we are really serious of avoiding major population declines from future (eventually also more virulent) pandemics and consider our selves "civilized" rather than expendable biomass this is a fundamental social organization breakthrough we must achieve.
disposablegeny 4y ago
I'm using a throwaway due to the medical nature of this topic. Covid was the beginning of the horrors of the west's increasingly "inverted demographic pyramid" (i.e. too many olds). I worked my entire life to qualify to immigrate to a stable country and start a family. My wife fell pregnant during the pandemic shutdown and needed simple outpatient surgery to save the baby but it was considered "non-essential" and she was forced to pass the corpse on the toilet at home, with no friends or family allowed to visit and offer comfort. Thanks to complications from that experience, she is now barren. Everything we've worked towards since we were 15 gone. Being a coder, I know a number of professional women whose last chance at a baby was an IVF window that closed during the lockdowns. I don't think they will ever mentally recover. For reference, the average age of someone dying even "with" much less of Covid in my country is higher than the average life expectancy. Covid is just the opening volley of the boomers finishing raiding the future to extend and improve their remaining years. I fully expect forced blood and organ donations in the next decade.
- yonaguska 4y ago
  I am so sorry for your loss.
  - disposablegeny 4y ago
    I didn't expect kindness in a comment to hit me as it did. Thank you.
- fieryskiff11 4y ago
  [dead]
nickd2001 4y ago
A substantial part of this excess mortality will be due to the collapse of the NHS, caused by years of under-funding, exacerbated by the pandemic. Large numbers of people are dying at home waiting for an ambulance, in ambulances queued outside hospitals, on trolleys, or having arrived at the ward too late. The NHS needs a massive cash injection, we need to train more doctors and nurses in the UK, and their pay and working conditions need to be that which would motivate them to stay in the profession. Ditto social care, unpaid family carers need to be supported properly, we need paid carers to be treated with respect and paid reasonably so that good people are attracted and retained to the profession. Another reason the NHS is on its knees is wards are full of people mostly elderly that needn't be there but can't be discharged due to lack of social care provision. This is all having an effect on the economy too. I suspect that if taxes were be raised to pay for all this, it would be a net positive. For example, people who don't get to breaking point dealing with family care issues or illnesses for themselves or loved ones, tend to be able to focus more on work, do a better job, get promotions, and thus have more take home pay while contributing more tax. Starving the NHS of cash is utterly short-sighted in so many ways.

75 points by wanderingmind 4y ago

“… to 7.8% higher for ages 20-44.” Just slipped that in there; nothing to see here, move along, move along. I don’t know how many standard deviations away from normal this is, but it’s apparently a lot: — once in centuries — a lot. But I’m sure it’s nothing. And absolutely sure it’s not … the thing. Cause it’s not.

eddsh1994 4y ago
> “once in centuries” a lot. This is not a genuine quote from the article, emphasis is by OP
cma 4y ago
> Mortality for 2022 as a whole was [..] 7.8% lower than in 2020
- eddsh1994 4y ago
  > There is a striking difference in how mortality rates in 2022 compare to 2019 at different ages – ranging from 2.5% higher for ages 75-84 to 7.8% higher for ages 20-44. You quoted the wrong part.
  - cma 4y ago
    75-84 year olds are more vaccinated ("88.9% of eligible adult care home residents" are vaccinated), and many with vulnerable conditions were already killed off earlier than otherwise by covid. If we can get those other 11.1% to chose the vax, maybe we can get those elderly excess numbers closer to 2019. Suicide is the leading cause of death under 45: brexit's negative impact on the economy and the 2022 war crash might be part of the story there, but I'm not sure if that was where the increase was. If we could have had everyone lock down just 1.5 weeks earlier on the initial wave and then done everything the same we could have prevented large amounts of covid's human and economic impact and made it to vaccine land without as much damage.
    - hammock 4y ago
      >Suicide is the leading cause of death under 45 What’s your source? Data I’ve seen says that’s not the case anymore. It’s overdose: the leading cause for people ages 18-45 would be unintentional drug overdose due to synthetic opioids. That number would exceed the second highest leading cause of death (suicide in 2020 and COVID-19 in 2021.) Source: CDC https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2022/10/02/fact-check-fentanyl-leading-cause-of-death-among-adults/65417990007/ https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/202...
      - jackvalentine 4y ago
        The article is about the UK, not the U.S.
        hammock 4y ago
        Is there a source for the UK then? In the UK in 2021 there were 84.4 overdose deaths per million compared to 105 suicides per million that’s across all age groups. Not sure what the 18-45 demo looks like but it would be much closer, if not flipped
    - ed25519FUUU 4y ago
      Nothing is free. Locking people down earlier or for longer could easily cause more excess death for young people.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        Earlier lockdown would've meant shorter lockdown. There are always trade-offs, but sometimes there are also synergies.
bobkazamakis 4y ago
Definitely not. All of our yutes have plenty of hope for the future, and those deaths of despair are actually evidence of how capitalism is working very well.
- primeblue 4y ago
  [dead]
myko 4y ago
It is likely covid-19 related, yes. Not vaccine related, which I think you may be implying. Excess deaths have been climbing since covid kicked off: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid; we're not doing a good job determining the effects of long covid.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - myko 4y ago
    The vaccine technology used was studied for 20+ years. Billions of doses have been administered. They're safe. This antivax nonsense should be banned from the site. Just read your own article: "Any link to Covid vaccines has been ruled out on the basis of international evidence demonstrating their safety in pregnancy, but PHS confirmed that it had not checked the vaccination status of any of the mothers affected. ... Since April 2022, the neonatal mortality rate has been falling and - between May 2022 and October 2022, the most recent month for which data is available - has been consistently lower than expected when compared against the pre-pandemic averages." The children in the article were too young to be vaccinated. The more likely explanation is either the kids got covid, or received subpar care due to staffing shortages caused by covid. Please stop spreading antivax sentiment.
- notthevax 4y ago
  [flagged]
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  Factually, the majority of excess death is no longer COVID-attributed. We’re either missing another modality by which COVID kills — or there’s another cause. That’s according to the OECD mortality figures. https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/covid-mortality.png https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/covid-mortality.png We know from re-analysis of the mRNA trials that their major injury rate is at least 1 in 800. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYR1wz-Cf_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYR1wz-Cf_M And just coincidentally, 1/800 times the 500M doses in the US is very close to what a 10% increase in mortality (blue line) would be for two years — about 300,000 deaths a year. But I’m sure that it’s a coincidence that our non-COVID-attributed excess death matches the serious injury rate of mRNA vaccines and begins around the same period (purple line going below black line in 21Q2).

walterbell 4y ago

Some US data, https://infonomena.substack.com/p/whered-all-the-workers-go https://infonomena.substack.com/p/whered-all-the-workers-go > In 2021, however, group life payments exploded by 20.7% over the five year average and by 15% over the acute pandemic year of 2020. Why would healthy young and middle-age people suddenly begin dying in large numbers in 2021 when they’d navigated 2020 with relative success? > ... In 2020, the vulnerable died of Covid at unusually high rates. In 2021 and 2022, Covid continued its assault, but the young, middle-aged, and healthy also died in aberrantly high numbers of something else.

csomar 4y ago
Is this something only happening in the UK or are other countries also experiencing this? Can this be linked to the coronavirus or a previous coronavirus infection? Not fan of conspiracy theories but could this be why China was quite opposed to opening up?
- lumost 4y ago
  The lockdowns and other societal effects of Covid could also play a role. Alcoholism is way up, along with other substance abuse issues. Shutting down office culture removed a substantial fixture of individuals social lives. Rather than supporting wfh - many companies forced new hires to move to cities just to work in tiny apartments where they know no one. It’ll take ages for the statisticians, sociologists, and economists to sort out exactly what was happening between 2020 and 20XX when society settles down.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    That leftmost X is like the most crushing single digit replacement possible, haha.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > other societal effects of Covid could also play a role There’s also a large section of the population that’s now generally anti-vax and anti-medicine. (I’ve seen it in my family.)

rcme 4y ago

Governments have really dropped the ball in terms of de-escalating the perception of covid. Once the vaccines were available, and it was clear that Covid has become endemic, governments should have made it abundantly clear that the disease should not be treated any differently than the cold or flu. Instead, we are seeing the effects of prolonged fear over covid. For instance, child ICUs were full as RSV ravaged classrooms filled with children with weak immune systems. Multiple people I know have had extremely important medical appointments, e.g. the first OB visit during pregnancy, that they had to push back because of a Covid infection. The government should be telling people that the risk / reward tradeoff of such a decision is not worth it.

haldujai 4y ago

In my opinion (physician/radiologist) we're going to see higher mortality and health care costs for a while as we are just starting to feel the effects of covid/prolonged lockdowns on missed screening. As one example, at my large tertiary care centre we were doing around 80% less screening mammograms during the pandemic and we are seeing ~2-3x more females presenting with locally advanced breast cancer than we were pre-covid (I believe the breast division is publishing a study on this in Ontario). Locally advanced at presentation means you now also need systemic therapy (chemo) with its complications and possibly an axillary lymph node dissection (fair bit of morbidity with this) instead of what would have been a lumpectomy+radiation+sentinal node biopsy. Beyond the direct patient morbidity and mortality effects (higher rates of metastatic disease and death go hand in hand with advanced presentations of all cancer) the strain on the system will mean we're busy/spending on dealing with these very sick patients that will undoubtedly impact other care we can provide (only so many $ and human resources to go around) and there will be some cascading effect (how much, I'm not sure). It will take 3-5 years to fully capture what the human and financial cost of all of this would have been, versus what was saved with prolonged lockdowns (particularly post delta when Covid stopped becoming very deadly).

gandalfgeek 4y ago
The "COVID deniers", as they were labeled, (think people like Jay Bhattacharya, Scott Atlas et al), warned about all of this. They presented the tradeoffs and probabilities on both sides. But they were completely shut down without debate, in the name of "following the science." They were shut down in concerted fashion-- by govt, by social media (under govt coercion, or ideological pull), by legacy media. And now the truth is coming out, and there is still no accountability for the "beat COVID at all costs" proponents. If we are to prevent this the next time a pandemic rolls through the world (and it will), there needs to be a society-level post-mortem, and not a blameless one.
- lettergram 4y ago
  [flagged]
- sdwr 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

college_physics 4y ago

Some people diligently try to make sense of what happened but I have the distinct sense the public simply wants to move on and wipe the pandemic from memory as there are more pressing 'fights'. Except viruses have no brain, no hurt feelings, no divisive politics, just their inexorable multiplication logic. The writing is on the wall.

TrispusAttucks 4y ago
Never forget what happened. That's how history repeats.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Well it would be great if people were pushing for reforms that actually would prevent these problems (basically however you’d define them) from happening again. Namely: TESTING so we have actual data to make decisions with, immediately and continuously. We were completely flying blind when big, big decisions had to be made. It’s a stupid argument to ask whether the blind decisions we made were right or wrong when we could focus on not being blind next time.
  - college_physics 4y ago
    I think we also need to have a global alert system that somehow works independently on any political or other friction. It should organized to be resilient, tamper proof and transparent. If we are really serious of avoiding major population declines from future (eventually also more virulent) pandemics and consider our selves "civilized" rather than expendable biomass this is a fundamental social organization breakthrough we must achieve.

disposablegeny 4y ago

I'm using a throwaway due to the medical nature of this topic. Covid was the beginning of the horrors of the west's increasingly "inverted demographic pyramid" (i.e. too many olds). I worked my entire life to qualify to immigrate to a stable country and start a family. My wife fell pregnant during the pandemic shutdown and needed simple outpatient surgery to save the baby but it was considered "non-essential" and she was forced to pass the corpse on the toilet at home, with no friends or family allowed to visit and offer comfort. Thanks to complications from that experience, she is now barren. Everything we've worked towards since we were 15 gone. Being a coder, I know a number of professional women whose last chance at a baby was an IVF window that closed during the lockdowns. I don't think they will ever mentally recover. For reference, the average age of someone dying even "with" much less of Covid in my country is higher than the average life expectancy. Covid is just the opening volley of the boomers finishing raiding the future to extend and improve their remaining years. I fully expect forced blood and organ donations in the next decade.

yonaguska 4y ago
I am so sorry for your loss.
- disposablegeny 4y ago
  I didn't expect kindness in a comment to hit me as it did. Thank you.
fieryskiff11 4y ago
[dead]

nickd2001 4y ago

A substantial part of this excess mortality will be due to the collapse of the NHS, caused by years of under-funding, exacerbated by the pandemic. Large numbers of people are dying at home waiting for an ambulance, in ambulances queued outside hospitals, on trolleys, or having arrived at the ward too late. The NHS needs a massive cash injection, we need to train more doctors and nurses in the UK, and their pay and working conditions need to be that which would motivate them to stay in the profession. Ditto social care, unpaid family carers need to be supported properly, we need paid carers to be treated with respect and paid reasonably so that good people are attracted and retained to the profession. Another reason the NHS is on its knees is wards are full of people mostly elderly that needn't be there but can't be discharged due to lack of social care provision. This is all having an effect on the economy too. I suspect that if taxes were be raised to pay for all this, it would be a net positive. For example, people who don't get to breaking point dealing with family care issues or illnesses for themselves or loved ones, tend to be able to focus more on work, do a better job, get promotions, and thus have more take home pay while contributing more tax. Starving the NHS of cash is utterly short-sighted in so many ways.