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This analysis is incredibly flawed. It's face-palm levels of statistical incompetence here. > High energy prices can cost lives. They discourage people from he

This analysis is incredibly flawed. It's face-palm levels of statistical incompetence here. > High energy prices can cost lives. They discourage people from heating their homes properly, and living in cold conditions raises the risk of cardiac and respiratory problems. Cardiac and respiratory problems you say! Hmmm, I wonder if there's a virus circulating that turns lungs into swiss cheese....or if it causes massive cardiac stress and damage too. The author's presumption about how energy prices can lead to excess deaths hinges upon a mechanism that COVID-19 also affects. It's not correlation: it's causation. COVID-19 causes respiratory and cardiac problems. They did not even attempt to address this fact! So then, they say "well some of these death's weren't caused by COVID-19." Ok sure. But how many of those folks who died from "the cold" actually died of hypothermia? Out of the ones that died from cardiac or repository distress, how many had prior COVID-19 infections? Were they recovered? If they recovered, was it full or did they have lingering, permanent long-COVID symptoms? Because we know there's a causal relationship, it really isn't hard to make the next step of inference to understand that this disease will be a very strong cofounding variable in those non-COVID-19 attributed excess deaths. tl;dr This article is BS because it ignores the causal relationship that COVID-19 has on mechanism by which higher energy prices could plausibly lead to increased mortality.

barbegal 3y ago
They have at least attempted to compare these excess deaths with a model of Covid excess deaths (although models are always wrong to varying degrees) The most interesting thing to me is how younger ages who previously haven't been affected much by Covid seem to have suffered this past winter https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
- dathinab 3y ago
  at least from people around me in Germany "younger people" seem to have been more affected by bad Covid cases then at any time before like in my extended family/friend cycle Covid cases where people needed multipel weeks to recover from where rare before this winter, but not rare this winter but due to changes in how Covid was handled in general I'm wouldn't be surprised if less then half the cases ended up in any Covid statistics through then concluding from your personal environment to all of Germany is query a far stretch
  - TylerE 3y ago
    I’ve observed the same in my peer group. There’s a reason Instill wear an N95 whenever I’m out and about and it isn’t totally impractical. My personal pet (non scientific) theory is that repeated infections over-sensitize the immune system, almost like an allergic reaction or something. Many of them seem To be on their 3rd or 4th rodeo at this point. Comments like “the first two times it was just a cold, this time it was like a really really bad flu” are common.
    - pfannkuchen 3y ago
      Do you have a theory for why COVID would behave in a novel way with respect to worsening on repeat infection? I have not heard of this type of behavior for other viruses. In general there seems to be a willingness to grant COVID special powers among viruses, e.g. the whole “maybe natural immunity doesn’t work at all!” saga. But maybe this does happen for other viruses and I just haven’t heard of it?
      - bugglebeetle 3y ago
        Weakening the immune system is not an uncommon property of viruses and Coronaviruses are know to not engender long term, durable immunity. So, with COVID, what we have is not “special powers,” but a combination of both qualities in a more (at the population-level) virulent disease. Natural immunity for COVID works pretty much the same as it does for other Coronaviruses (you can get the same one multiple times per year), but that’s problematic given the disease’s overall severity and propensity to damage people’s immune systems in a way that makes them susceptible to other illnesses (see the recent spate of post-COVID fungal infections).
      - halper 3y ago
        Dengue is such a virus: repeated infections get worse.
      - bad_habbits_nor 3y ago
        Quoting: 'repeated infections over-sensitize the immune system, almost like an allergic reaction or something." Try the 'R' in the (Strain-) Sequency (RRRRR) maybe it matches your thought (not an expert...) regards...
- mharig 3y ago
  With every mRNA vaccination, the risk of getting (at least) COVID19 rises more. Just look into the studies of 22 and 23.
kbelder 3y ago
But similarly, COVID-19 studies during last winter may not account for the increased respiratory problems due to high energy prices? It's confounded both ways.
nerdponx 3y ago
The data shows that there are excess deaths beyond what can be directly attributed to Covid-19, that Covid-19 deaths are themselves not strongly correlated with energy prices, and that excess deaths in 2022-2023 were moderately correlated with energy prices. So we can be somewhat confident that Covid-19 is not the primary causal pathway to excess deaths in 2022-2023. The worst problem is that the author concluded that there is a causal path between the high prices and excess deaths, which they absolutely did not do enough work to justify. For example, I don't see any longitudinal analysis here, nor do I see the effects of weather (temperature, humidity, cold snaps, high winds) accounted for. If your main causal hypothesis is that physically being cold caused the excess deaths, then something like 5th percentile temperature, events like "cold snap below -5 C for 3 or more days", etc. should be strongly correlated with excess deaths, after controlling for energy prices and baseline seasonality over several years. Consider that temperature might actually be the underlying causal factor for both high prices and excess deaths! That is: cold winter causes more deaths, and cold winter also causes higher prices. Maybe also having a warmer climate is correlated with being less dependent on Russian gas for heat due to geopolitical factors. That would be an interesting article in its own right, but it's not quite as exciting of a headline. These points should be incredibly obvious to anyone writing for The Economist, and the fact that this wasn't even mentioned makes me think this article is more than just "incompetence" but outright bad faith. > As wholesale energy prices fall and temperatures rise, the immediate threat may be over, but it is clear Mr Putin’s energy weapon was deadly. Ugh, does it get any cornier? I feel like readers ought to start demanding data and source code along with allegedly "data-driven" articles like this. That way at least I can do my own analysis using theirs as a starting point. Their list of sources at the bottom is not exactly something I can work with: > Chart sources: The Economist’s excess-deaths tracker; Copernicus; HEPI In any case, junk articles like this are exactly the reason I haven't subscribed to The Economist in years. Blogs written by actual economists seem to be the only place to find any sober analysis nowadays.
- stuaxo 3y ago
  Handily forgets that energy prices (and all the others) were shooting upwards before Putin, the Economist is terrible.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
UncleOxidant 3y ago
>> High energy prices can cost lives. They discourage people from heating their homes properly, and living in cold conditions raises the risk of cardiac and respiratory problems. I wonder if this assertion is even true. Cold conditions have been shown to be beneficial in some ways (increase metabolism, increase in brown fat which burns more calories than regular fat, etc). I'm sure there are limits to this, but IIRC Europe ended up having a surprisingly warm winter this year.
- fy20 3y ago
  My guess is it isn't cold itself that kills, but the effects of living in a cold, and damp, environment. Take the UK for example, many houses are over 100 years old, made of brick and little insulation. Even before energy prices went crazy, during the winter you'd be paying hundreds of pounds a month for heating and some parts of the house would barely reach 20c. In most parts of the UK, temperatures below freezing are rare so it's probably +5C or similar outside at that time. And its an island that rains a lot, so combine that with 90% humidity and you have a rather high dew point. Now back to the energy prices. Gas prices in the UK are around 3x what they were before COVID, and electricity prices around 5x - and let's not even start about other living costs. So you do as the media says and try to save money and energy by turning down the thermostat. Maybe you also turn off the radiator in the spare bedroom, and try to be smart by sealing up drafty windows. This means your cold and damp home will be closer to the dew point and is going to be less ventilated (forced air heating or ventilation is not a thing in the UK; you ventilate by opening windows), which will to lead to more mold and fungus, and we have something which causes health issues. The winter in the UK was colder than normal too, with more days below freezing than usual. (I'm from the UK, but live somewhere colder now, but as the humidity is so low during winter and houses are insulated properly, mold is not a thing here)
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
everforward 3y ago
This doesn't seem like a sound argument to me. Applied more generally, it quickly turns a bunch of statistics into nonsense. E.g. the same argument could be made about COVID deaths themselves. They didn't die because of COVID, they died because they were obese, or smokers, or diabetic, or old, etc. Hell, you could argue that nobody died of COVID at all. They all died from failing to properly isolate themselves. Exposure to other people is causally related to getting COVID. People don't die from heart attacks, they die from poor diet and exercise. People don't die of cancer, they die from eating red meat or not taking enough D3 or whatever. People don't die of gunshots, they die from poverty and poor mental health. The cold is the proximate cause of death here. They have a risk factor from COVID (or diabetes, or age, or any of the other crapload of comorbidities related to hypothermia), which made them vulnerable to dying from the cold. They might have survived if they hadn't had COVID, but they also might have survived if they were younger, or in better shape, or didn't have a different health condition.
- tuatoru 3y ago
  > Applied more generally, it quickly turns a bunch of statistics [published in popular magazines] into nonsense. Well done! Remember that.
- iudqnolq 3y ago
  You've identified a lot of complexity. But the answer is not to throw up your hands and declare everything equally unknowable, it's to do the hard work to figure out what's actually going on. That's not something we can do behind our keyboards right now, that doesn't mean their isn't a correct, knowable answer.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  I'm not sure what your point is here. You're trying to make some kind of reductio ad absurdum argument about what, statistics in general? Causal analysis is bad because causation is complicated at the intersection of social science and medicine? All models are wrong and therefore all models are useless? The primary absurdity here is that the author didn't even do an acceptable correlational study, yet presented a specific and strong causal conclusion. The author failed to establish any causality for anything at all, other than weakly ruling out Covid as a notable cause of excess death in Germany. The author's hypothesis is that people being cold (due to high energy prices) is the cause, but they absolutely do not manage to establish even the faintest hint of a valid causal argument to support that hypothesis.
TexanFeller 3y ago
> if there's a virus circulating that turns lungs into swiss cheese Oh come off it, it wasn't doing that anymore last year. Almost 100% of the population had been vaccinated, recovered from infection, or most likely both in 2022 so for most it wasn't even as bad as a flu.
nradov 3y ago
Your medical analysis is badly flawed. When people are cold this causes peripheral vasoconstriction, thus raising blood pressure. Not a problem for healthy young people, but it increases the risk of major adverse cardiac events for frail elderly people. This is common knowledge in the field.
- dzhiurgis 3y ago
  The difference is 5 mmHG which idk if medically significant.
throwaway14356 3y ago
I thought it was rather confusing how people with 2+ conditions died from covid(?) You could also not count them but it would be equally wrong. How hard does one have to sneeze to blame a traffic fatality on covid? It can never be statistically significant with so many people in bed and working from hone. If the heating bill would be the problem we would all have died? The article is as wrong as all the others, perhaps more so but I cant tell? can I?
diebeforei485 3y ago
Would people with Covid complications still have died if they had heat?

barbegal 3y ago

They have at least attempted to compare these excess deaths with a model of Covid excess deaths (although models are always wrong to varying degrees) The most interesting thing to me is how younger ages who previously haven't been affected much by Covid seem to have suffered this past winter https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

dathinab 3y ago
at least from people around me in Germany "younger people" seem to have been more affected by bad Covid cases then at any time before like in my extended family/friend cycle Covid cases where people needed multipel weeks to recover from where rare before this winter, but not rare this winter but due to changes in how Covid was handled in general I'm wouldn't be surprised if less then half the cases ended up in any Covid statistics through then concluding from your personal environment to all of Germany is query a far stretch
- TylerE 3y ago
  I’ve observed the same in my peer group. There’s a reason Instill wear an N95 whenever I’m out and about and it isn’t totally impractical. My personal pet (non scientific) theory is that repeated infections over-sensitize the immune system, almost like an allergic reaction or something. Many of them seem To be on their 3rd or 4th rodeo at this point. Comments like “the first two times it was just a cold, this time it was like a really really bad flu” are common.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    Do you have a theory for why COVID would behave in a novel way with respect to worsening on repeat infection? I have not heard of this type of behavior for other viruses. In general there seems to be a willingness to grant COVID special powers among viruses, e.g. the whole “maybe natural immunity doesn’t work at all!” saga. But maybe this does happen for other viruses and I just haven’t heard of it?
    - bugglebeetle 3y ago
      Weakening the immune system is not an uncommon property of viruses and Coronaviruses are know to not engender long term, durable immunity. So, with COVID, what we have is not “special powers,” but a combination of both qualities in a more (at the population-level) virulent disease. Natural immunity for COVID works pretty much the same as it does for other Coronaviruses (you can get the same one multiple times per year), but that’s problematic given the disease’s overall severity and propensity to damage people’s immune systems in a way that makes them susceptible to other illnesses (see the recent spate of post-COVID fungal infections).
    - halper 3y ago
      Dengue is such a virus: repeated infections get worse.
    - bad_habbits_nor 3y ago
      Quoting: 'repeated infections over-sensitize the immune system, almost like an allergic reaction or something." Try the 'R' in the (Strain-) Sequency (RRRRR) maybe it matches your thought (not an expert...) regards...
mharig 3y ago
With every mRNA vaccination, the risk of getting (at least) COVID19 rises more. Just look into the studies of 22 and 23.

kbelder 3y ago

But similarly, COVID-19 studies during last winter may not account for the increased respiratory problems due to high energy prices? It's confounded both ways.

nerdponx 3y ago

The data shows that there are excess deaths beyond what can be directly attributed to Covid-19, that Covid-19 deaths are themselves not strongly correlated with energy prices, and that excess deaths in 2022-2023 were moderately correlated with energy prices. So we can be somewhat confident that Covid-19 is not the primary causal pathway to excess deaths in 2022-2023. The worst problem is that the author concluded that there is a causal path between the high prices and excess deaths, which they absolutely did not do enough work to justify. For example, I don't see any longitudinal analysis here, nor do I see the effects of weather (temperature, humidity, cold snaps, high winds) accounted for. If your main causal hypothesis is that physically being cold caused the excess deaths, then something like 5th percentile temperature, events like "cold snap below -5 C for 3 or more days", etc. should be strongly correlated with excess deaths, after controlling for energy prices and baseline seasonality over several years. Consider that temperature might actually be the underlying causal factor for both high prices and excess deaths! That is: cold winter causes more deaths, and cold winter also causes higher prices. Maybe also having a warmer climate is correlated with being less dependent on Russian gas for heat due to geopolitical factors. That would be an interesting article in its own right, but it's not quite as exciting of a headline. These points should be incredibly obvious to anyone writing for The Economist, and the fact that this wasn't even mentioned makes me think this article is more than just "incompetence" but outright bad faith. > As wholesale energy prices fall and temperatures rise, the immediate threat may be over, but it is clear Mr Putin’s energy weapon was deadly. Ugh, does it get any cornier? I feel like readers ought to start demanding data and source code along with allegedly "data-driven" articles like this. That way at least I can do my own analysis using theirs as a starting point. Their list of sources at the bottom is not exactly something I can work with: > Chart sources: The Economist’s excess-deaths tracker; Copernicus; HEPI In any case, junk articles like this are exactly the reason I haven't subscribed to The Economist in years. Blogs written by actual economists seem to be the only place to find any sober analysis nowadays.

stuaxo 3y ago
Handily forgets that energy prices (and all the others) were shooting upwards before Putin, the Economist is terrible.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

UncleOxidant 3y ago

>> High energy prices can cost lives. They discourage people from heating their homes properly, and living in cold conditions raises the risk of cardiac and respiratory problems. I wonder if this assertion is even true. Cold conditions have been shown to be beneficial in some ways (increase metabolism, increase in brown fat which burns more calories than regular fat, etc). I'm sure there are limits to this, but IIRC Europe ended up having a surprisingly warm winter this year.

fy20 3y ago
My guess is it isn't cold itself that kills, but the effects of living in a cold, and damp, environment. Take the UK for example, many houses are over 100 years old, made of brick and little insulation. Even before energy prices went crazy, during the winter you'd be paying hundreds of pounds a month for heating and some parts of the house would barely reach 20c. In most parts of the UK, temperatures below freezing are rare so it's probably +5C or similar outside at that time. And its an island that rains a lot, so combine that with 90% humidity and you have a rather high dew point. Now back to the energy prices. Gas prices in the UK are around 3x what they were before COVID, and electricity prices around 5x - and let's not even start about other living costs. So you do as the media says and try to save money and energy by turning down the thermostat. Maybe you also turn off the radiator in the spare bedroom, and try to be smart by sealing up drafty windows. This means your cold and damp home will be closer to the dew point and is going to be less ventilated (forced air heating or ventilation is not a thing in the UK; you ventilate by opening windows), which will to lead to more mold and fungus, and we have something which causes health issues. The winter in the UK was colder than normal too, with more days below freezing than usual. (I'm from the UK, but live somewhere colder now, but as the humidity is so low during winter and houses are insulated properly, mold is not a thing here)

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

everforward 3y ago

This doesn't seem like a sound argument to me. Applied more generally, it quickly turns a bunch of statistics into nonsense. E.g. the same argument could be made about COVID deaths themselves. They didn't die because of COVID, they died because they were obese, or smokers, or diabetic, or old, etc. Hell, you could argue that nobody died of COVID at all. They all died from failing to properly isolate themselves. Exposure to other people is causally related to getting COVID. People don't die from heart attacks, they die from poor diet and exercise. People don't die of cancer, they die from eating red meat or not taking enough D3 or whatever. People don't die of gunshots, they die from poverty and poor mental health. The cold is the proximate cause of death here. They have a risk factor from COVID (or diabetes, or age, or any of the other crapload of comorbidities related to hypothermia), which made them vulnerable to dying from the cold. They might have survived if they hadn't had COVID, but they also might have survived if they were younger, or in better shape, or didn't have a different health condition.

tuatoru 3y ago
> Applied more generally, it quickly turns a bunch of statistics [published in popular magazines] into nonsense. Well done! Remember that.
iudqnolq 3y ago
You've identified a lot of complexity. But the answer is not to throw up your hands and declare everything equally unknowable, it's to do the hard work to figure out what's actually going on. That's not something we can do behind our keyboards right now, that doesn't mean their isn't a correct, knowable answer.
nerdponx 3y ago
I'm not sure what your point is here. You're trying to make some kind of reductio ad absurdum argument about what, statistics in general? Causal analysis is bad because causation is complicated at the intersection of social science and medicine? All models are wrong and therefore all models are useless? The primary absurdity here is that the author didn't even do an acceptable correlational study, yet presented a specific and strong causal conclusion. The author failed to establish any causality for anything at all, other than weakly ruling out Covid as a notable cause of excess death in Germany. The author's hypothesis is that people being cold (due to high energy prices) is the cause, but they absolutely do not manage to establish even the faintest hint of a valid causal argument to support that hypothesis.

TexanFeller 3y ago

> if there's a virus circulating that turns lungs into swiss cheese Oh come off it, it wasn't doing that anymore last year. Almost 100% of the population had been vaccinated, recovered from infection, or most likely both in 2022 so for most it wasn't even as bad as a flu.

nradov 3y ago

Your medical analysis is badly flawed. When people are cold this causes peripheral vasoconstriction, thus raising blood pressure. Not a problem for healthy young people, but it increases the risk of major adverse cardiac events for frail elderly people. This is common knowledge in the field.

dzhiurgis 3y ago
The difference is 5 mmHG which idk if medically significant.

throwaway14356 3y ago

I thought it was rather confusing how people with 2+ conditions died from covid(?) You could also not count them but it would be equally wrong. How hard does one have to sneeze to blame a traffic fatality on covid? It can never be statistically significant with so many people in bed and working from hone. If the heating bill would be the problem we would all have died? The article is as wrong as all the others, perhaps more so but I cant tell? can I?

diebeforei485 3y ago

Would people with Covid complications still have died if they had heat?