14 ms·

Excess mortality across the Western World since the Covid pandemic

52 points by geox 2y ago

admissionsguy 2y ago
[flagged]
- ellrob88 2y ago
  Is that based on your personal interpretation of the facts, or do you think there is part of this study that proves that?
  - admissionsguy 2y ago
    The part re excess mortality due to non-covid causes means Fauci killed lots of people. Even if he had saved more from covid (he had not), it would not change the fact that his policies killed many who would not have died otherwise.
    - marcinzm 2y ago
      Following that logic, I suspect 90% of congress should be executed for one law or another that they voted for.
    - myrmidon 2y ago
      > The part re excess mortality due to non-covid causes means Fauci killed lots of people. No. To establish that "Fauci killed lots of people" you would have to show that cumulative deaths would have been lower without actions that Fauci was responsible for (=> difficult because you lack a good baseline). This report most definitely does NOT show that. Then, to have an actual case, you would also have to show that those decisions were made in a manner criminally neglecting facts known at the time (=> not 4 years later!).
      - admissionsguy 2y ago
        > cumulative deaths would have been lower without actions that Fauci was responsible for Ethically, it is enough to show that his policies killed people. I cannot go into a tobacco factory, kill the night guard, burn the factory to the ground and expect recognition for saving lives. So starting from the position that unjust things were done during COVID, it is now the time to investigate what specific laws were breached, so that justice can be sought. Hence the slogan 'arrest Fauci'. The report mentions excess death from non-COVID causes. Is it disputable that these were due to non-pharmaceutical interventions? There is also a large number of contemporary warnings regarding the effect of lockdowns on diagnosis and treatment of other diseases.
        myrmidon 2y ago
        > The report mentions excess death from non-COVID causes. Is it disputable that these were due to non-pharmaceutical interventions? From what I can see the article makes no effort to separate Covid related excess mortality from direct or indirectly covid related, which would be crucial to support your argument. Consider e.g.: - Death by delayed/cancelled medical procedures/diagnostics (because healthcare was busy with people dying from covid at the time) - Weaker immune system because of lack of exposure during/after covid If your hypothesis is "by ignoring covid and skipping lockdowns we could have avoided this excess mortality" then that hypothesis is quite contrarian in first place AND not supported by the facts presented in the article.
- myrmidon 2y ago
  As a non-US-citizen my understanding of this is limited, but I see very little fact-based criticism and instead personal attacks and calls to "jail him" without even a clear case. That in itself is strongly anti-democratic behavior that I would be extremely hesitant to support even if there was a strong factual foundation to the accusations (which I can't see so far). Which aspect of this report makes you confident that MTG is "right"? What exactly should Fauci be imprisoned for?
  - eru 2y ago
    > That in itself is strongly anti-democratic behavior [...] Not sure what this has to do with democracy? Seems more like a rule of law issue?
    - myrmidon 2y ago
      I don't think it should be punishable to call for political opponents to be imprisoned. But derailing a discussion from factual criticism into emotional populism appears extremely harmful to the concept of democracy itself to me: In an ideal democracy, candidates would be elected based on how their political alignment and intended actions match up with voters. But if politicians denigrate their competition instead, and paint everyone outside their camp as enemy/traitor/unvotable, then this essentially frees them from having to compete on policy (which leads to incompetent politicians in power that are super hard to get rid of).
      - fluoridation 2y ago
        >if politicians denigrate their competition instead, and paint everyone outside their camp as enemy/traitor/unvotable, then this essentially frees them from having to compete on policy What? How does the conclusion follow from the premise? That a politician resorts to ad hominem fallacies does not by itself mean that whoever listens to them will act purely on those fallacies over everything else. Moreover, the voters are just as likely to vote based on similar fallacies that they come up with themselves. "Oh, I don't like that guy, he has a bent nose." Ultimately it's each voter's responsibility to judge the candidates based on appropriate metric and not be swayed by bullshit, whether of their own creation or not.
auggierose 2y ago
[dead]
- eulgro 2y ago
  A common side effect is significantly increased immunity to SARS-CoV-2.
  - typeofhuman 2y ago
    Define "significantly increased"
- qsort 2y ago
  Paywalled so I guess I'll never know, but in spite of the scary sounding name the associated press release says the following: “Despite a large body of evidence from extraordinary efforts by investigators around the world, our committee found that in many cases, if not most, evidence was insufficient to accept or reject causality for a particular potential harm from a specific COVID-19 vaccine,” said committee vice chair Anne Bass, professor of clinical medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine, and a rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery and New York Presbyterian Hospital. “In other cases, we did find sufficient evidence to favor rejection, favor acceptance, or establish causality. It is important to note, however, that identifying a harm does not mean that it occurs frequently. Harms associated with vaccines are rare.”
  - auggierose 2y ago
    There is the "Read Free Online" button, though. I guess you don't want to know. I find the press release very interesting, by the way. It is almost as if they want to assure people that their report is politically correct.
  - deng 2y ago
    It is not paywalled, you can read the summary here https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/27746/chapter/2 https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/27746/chapter/2
- 2y ago
rrr_oh_man 2y ago
I've been watching EuroMoMo¹ since early 2020² and it's done a great job visualizing the stats. Especially if you break it down by countries and age groups. ¹ European Mortality Monitor: https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps ² Blog post from Jan 29 2020: https://romanabashin.com/coronavirus-2020-outbreak/ https://romanabashin.com/coronavirus-2020-outbreak/
- unsupp0rted 2y ago
  What happened here? https://imgur.com/8cq4ak3 https://imgur.com/8cq4ak3
  - weberer 2y ago
    That spike is on week 40. Scroll down to the results by country and see that the spike was just in Israel. Week 40 2023 includes October 7th, so it was due to those attacks.
    - unsupp0rted 2y ago
      Wow nice catch!
VagabundoP 2y ago
My guess is long term health effects from Covid and from treatment deferral for other diseases because of the effects Covid had on healthcare capacity.
eru 2y ago
> The total number of excess deaths in 47 countries of the Western World was 3 098 456 from 1 January 2020 until 31 December 2022. Hmm, would have been better to talk about lost quality adjusted life years, because someone old and frail dying 3 months earlier than expected vs someone previously healthy dying are two very different things.
- elzbardico 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - yyggvbb 2y ago
    My mom died of COVID.
    - elzbardico 2y ago
      Well man, mine too. My mother already had a poor health and even before covid I was aware that any respiratory infection like the one she had two years before covid could be fatal. But at least in 2018 she was promptly treated, with medicines to avoid the progression of secondary infection and fluid accumulation and despite the scare, was given oxygen, and she was saved. In 2021, despite her old age, doctors were prohibited in her city to pro-actively avoid secondary infection and in the end when they finally decided to treat her, she was put in a ventilator and had complications commonly associated with the use of ventilators. You can call me anything you want, but I will never stop believing that despite her death certificate says she died of Covid, she was an iatrogenic death.
brabel 2y ago
"In 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic onset and implementation of containment measures, records present 1 033 122 excess deaths (P-score 11.4%). In 2021, the year in which both containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines were used to address virus spread and infection, the highest number of excess deaths was reported: 1 256 942 excess deaths (P-score 13.8%). In 2022, when most containment measures were lifted and COVID-19 vaccines were continued, preliminary data present 808 392 excess deaths (P-score 8.8%)." I can only read the Abstract, but from the quote above, it may seem that the containment measures had only a limited effect in reducing excess deaths... but wouldn't the number of excess deaths in a hypothetical world where no measures had been taken at all (no masks, no vaccines, no social distancing) be exponentially growing?? Say, it started at 1 million, went to 1.2 million the next year (with some containment measures already in place) and it would probably have gone way higher the next year (but it didn't) if the pattern continued, wouldn't it? I guess eventually it would go back down, but that would probably only have happened when most people who are prone to dying from the virus would've have died already, which probably would take many millions more (ignoring the fact that viruses naturally become less lethal over time, as killing too many hosts is bad for spreading further). So I don't know, given all of these variables I would say 800,000 excess deaths in 2022 is perhaps showing that containment actually did work, just not as well as one would've hoped.
- realreality 2y ago
  Regarding 2022: > The presented data, especially for 2022, are thus preliminary and subject to backward revisions. The more recent data are usually more incomplete and therefore can undergo upward revisions over time. This implies that several of the reported excess mortality estimates can be underestimations.
- The_Colonel 2y ago
  > but wouldn't the number of excess deaths in a hypothetical world where no measures had been taken at all To me, a more likely scenario is that the virus would basically run through the world's population during the first year, killing most susceptible quickly. The fact the original was a more deadly strain and the complete overloading of medical care would not help either. > ignoring the fact that viruses naturally become less lethal over time, as killing too many hosts is bad for spreading further This is likely not a strong factor in Covid since it's not enough deadly and there's enough time to spread the virus before dying. A more fitting explanation is the reversion to the mean. Covid-19 was/is an exceptionally deadly strain of coronavirus, it's more likely that its mutations will trend in the direction of mean coronavirus lethality.
typeofhuman 2y ago
[flagged]
herschel113 2y ago
Paper puts concerns into vaccine dangers, which I am positive about to look at. But it's emphasis on vaccines seems cherry picked to me - their own excessive-death-by-country table shows countries with late / low vaccination (mostly eastern europe) coming out top on excessive deaths. This is not mentioned or explained in the analysis at all.
Bellamy 2y ago
Received: 9 June 2023 Accepted: 20 March 2024 First Published: 3 June 2024 Is it normal that it takes so long to go from Received to Accepted?
- PaulKeeble 2y ago
  Yes. The NIH intermural study on ME/CFS took well over a year to get published. The sheer volume of papers on Covid/Long Covid et el is staggering too something like 3/4s of a million individual bits of research have been published (all showing its bad news for humans!) and that combined with the doubling of days out sick everyone is enduring due to multiple Covid infections and the brain fog from Long Covid is likely not helping to get things handled quickly.
imwillofficial 2y ago
Huh wonder what it could be
DrNosferatu 2y ago
In Portugal, classic media frequently screams that our national excess mortality "is the absolute highest" in Europe - but omit that was only for a single week in the year, while this link shows that it's actually lower globally in time, and globally lower when compared to the majority of other countries. - What's your experience in your own country about this? We have a state National Health Service good enough to give us those nice real statistics, and, whose tasty business volume (if it were a private enterprise), is yearned by economic groups that have the financial muscle to buy constant Fox-like spin on how state health is "supposedly" so superlative bad, and therefore should be privatized. This paper clearly disproves their narrative - I guess this media narrative is driven 80% by economic interest / ideology - "get rid of the state"; and would even risk 20% by Putin's destabilization efforts.
enslavedrobot 2y ago
Excess deaths are likely related to the effects of lockdowns. The lack of exercise and mental stress suffered by the elderly over the course of the pandemic was huge. Check out Sweden, they had limited/no lockdowns, very high vaccination rate and low post pandemic excess deaths. Before the pandemic dad was a beast then he watched TV for 2 years and turned into a shuffling hunchback.
t0bia_s 2y ago
Why flagging this study? There are plenty more that monitor side effects of vaccines. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267340#40267364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267340#40267364

52 points by geox 2y ago

admissionsguy 2y ago

[flagged]

ellrob88 2y ago
Is that based on your personal interpretation of the facts, or do you think there is part of this study that proves that?
- admissionsguy 2y ago
  The part re excess mortality due to non-covid causes means Fauci killed lots of people. Even if he had saved more from covid (he had not), it would not change the fact that his policies killed many who would not have died otherwise.
  - marcinzm 2y ago
    Following that logic, I suspect 90% of congress should be executed for one law or another that they voted for.
  - myrmidon 2y ago
    > The part re excess mortality due to non-covid causes means Fauci killed lots of people. No. To establish that "Fauci killed lots of people" you would have to show that cumulative deaths would have been lower without actions that Fauci was responsible for (=> difficult because you lack a good baseline). This report most definitely does NOT show that. Then, to have an actual case, you would also have to show that those decisions were made in a manner criminally neglecting facts known at the time (=> not 4 years later!).
    - admissionsguy 2y ago
      > cumulative deaths would have been lower without actions that Fauci was responsible for Ethically, it is enough to show that his policies killed people. I cannot go into a tobacco factory, kill the night guard, burn the factory to the ground and expect recognition for saving lives. So starting from the position that unjust things were done during COVID, it is now the time to investigate what specific laws were breached, so that justice can be sought. Hence the slogan 'arrest Fauci'. The report mentions excess death from non-COVID causes. Is it disputable that these were due to non-pharmaceutical interventions? There is also a large number of contemporary warnings regarding the effect of lockdowns on diagnosis and treatment of other diseases.
      - myrmidon 2y ago
        > The report mentions excess death from non-COVID causes. Is it disputable that these were due to non-pharmaceutical interventions? From what I can see the article makes no effort to separate Covid related excess mortality from direct or indirectly covid related, which would be crucial to support your argument. Consider e.g.: - Death by delayed/cancelled medical procedures/diagnostics (because healthcare was busy with people dying from covid at the time) - Weaker immune system because of lack of exposure during/after covid If your hypothesis is "by ignoring covid and skipping lockdowns we could have avoided this excess mortality" then that hypothesis is quite contrarian in first place AND not supported by the facts presented in the article.
myrmidon 2y ago
As a non-US-citizen my understanding of this is limited, but I see very little fact-based criticism and instead personal attacks and calls to "jail him" without even a clear case. That in itself is strongly anti-democratic behavior that I would be extremely hesitant to support even if there was a strong factual foundation to the accusations (which I can't see so far). Which aspect of this report makes you confident that MTG is "right"? What exactly should Fauci be imprisoned for?
- eru 2y ago
  > That in itself is strongly anti-democratic behavior [...] Not sure what this has to do with democracy? Seems more like a rule of law issue?
  - myrmidon 2y ago
    I don't think it should be punishable to call for political opponents to be imprisoned. But derailing a discussion from factual criticism into emotional populism appears extremely harmful to the concept of democracy itself to me: In an ideal democracy, candidates would be elected based on how their political alignment and intended actions match up with voters. But if politicians denigrate their competition instead, and paint everyone outside their camp as enemy/traitor/unvotable, then this essentially frees them from having to compete on policy (which leads to incompetent politicians in power that are super hard to get rid of).
    - fluoridation 2y ago
      >if politicians denigrate their competition instead, and paint everyone outside their camp as enemy/traitor/unvotable, then this essentially frees them from having to compete on policy What? How does the conclusion follow from the premise? That a politician resorts to ad hominem fallacies does not by itself mean that whoever listens to them will act purely on those fallacies over everything else. Moreover, the voters are just as likely to vote based on similar fallacies that they come up with themselves. "Oh, I don't like that guy, he has a bent nose." Ultimately it's each voter's responsibility to judge the candidates based on appropriate metric and not be swayed by bullshit, whether of their own creation or not.

auggierose 2y ago

[dead]

eulgro 2y ago
A common side effect is significantly increased immunity to SARS-CoV-2.
- typeofhuman 2y ago
  Define "significantly increased"
qsort 2y ago
Paywalled so I guess I'll never know, but in spite of the scary sounding name the associated press release says the following: “Despite a large body of evidence from extraordinary efforts by investigators around the world, our committee found that in many cases, if not most, evidence was insufficient to accept or reject causality for a particular potential harm from a specific COVID-19 vaccine,” said committee vice chair Anne Bass, professor of clinical medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine, and a rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery and New York Presbyterian Hospital. “In other cases, we did find sufficient evidence to favor rejection, favor acceptance, or establish causality. It is important to note, however, that identifying a harm does not mean that it occurs frequently. Harms associated with vaccines are rare.”
- auggierose 2y ago
  There is the "Read Free Online" button, though. I guess you don't want to know. I find the press release very interesting, by the way. It is almost as if they want to assure people that their report is politically correct.
- deng 2y ago
  It is not paywalled, you can read the summary here https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/27746/chapter/2 https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/27746/chapter/2
2y ago

rrr_oh_man 2y ago

I've been watching EuroMoMo¹ since early 2020² and it's done a great job visualizing the stats. Especially if you break it down by countries and age groups. ¹ European Mortality Monitor: https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps ² Blog post from Jan 29 2020: https://romanabashin.com/coronavirus-2020-outbreak/ https://romanabashin.com/coronavirus-2020-outbreak/

unsupp0rted 2y ago
What happened here? https://imgur.com/8cq4ak3 https://imgur.com/8cq4ak3
- weberer 2y ago
  That spike is on week 40. Scroll down to the results by country and see that the spike was just in Israel. Week 40 2023 includes October 7th, so it was due to those attacks.
  - unsupp0rted 2y ago
    Wow nice catch!

VagabundoP 2y ago

My guess is long term health effects from Covid and from treatment deferral for other diseases because of the effects Covid had on healthcare capacity.

eru 2y ago

> The total number of excess deaths in 47 countries of the Western World was 3 098 456 from 1 January 2020 until 31 December 2022. Hmm, would have been better to talk about lost quality adjusted life years, because someone old and frail dying 3 months earlier than expected vs someone previously healthy dying are two very different things.

elzbardico 2y ago
[flagged]
- yyggvbb 2y ago
  My mom died of COVID.
  - elzbardico 2y ago
    Well man, mine too. My mother already had a poor health and even before covid I was aware that any respiratory infection like the one she had two years before covid could be fatal. But at least in 2018 she was promptly treated, with medicines to avoid the progression of secondary infection and fluid accumulation and despite the scare, was given oxygen, and she was saved. In 2021, despite her old age, doctors were prohibited in her city to pro-actively avoid secondary infection and in the end when they finally decided to treat her, she was put in a ventilator and had complications commonly associated with the use of ventilators. You can call me anything you want, but I will never stop believing that despite her death certificate says she died of Covid, she was an iatrogenic death.

brabel 2y ago

"In 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic onset and implementation of containment measures, records present 1 033 122 excess deaths (P-score 11.4%). In 2021, the year in which both containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines were used to address virus spread and infection, the highest number of excess deaths was reported: 1 256 942 excess deaths (P-score 13.8%). In 2022, when most containment measures were lifted and COVID-19 vaccines were continued, preliminary data present 808 392 excess deaths (P-score 8.8%)." I can only read the Abstract, but from the quote above, it may seem that the containment measures had only a limited effect in reducing excess deaths... but wouldn't the number of excess deaths in a hypothetical world where no measures had been taken at all (no masks, no vaccines, no social distancing) be exponentially growing?? Say, it started at 1 million, went to 1.2 million the next year (with some containment measures already in place) and it would probably have gone way higher the next year (but it didn't) if the pattern continued, wouldn't it? I guess eventually it would go back down, but that would probably only have happened when most people who are prone to dying from the virus would've have died already, which probably would take many millions more (ignoring the fact that viruses naturally become less lethal over time, as killing too many hosts is bad for spreading further). So I don't know, given all of these variables I would say 800,000 excess deaths in 2022 is perhaps showing that containment actually did work, just not as well as one would've hoped.

realreality 2y ago
Regarding 2022: > The presented data, especially for 2022, are thus preliminary and subject to backward revisions. The more recent data are usually more incomplete and therefore can undergo upward revisions over time. This implies that several of the reported excess mortality estimates can be underestimations.
The_Colonel 2y ago
> but wouldn't the number of excess deaths in a hypothetical world where no measures had been taken at all To me, a more likely scenario is that the virus would basically run through the world's population during the first year, killing most susceptible quickly. The fact the original was a more deadly strain and the complete overloading of medical care would not help either. > ignoring the fact that viruses naturally become less lethal over time, as killing too many hosts is bad for spreading further This is likely not a strong factor in Covid since it's not enough deadly and there's enough time to spread the virus before dying. A more fitting explanation is the reversion to the mean. Covid-19 was/is an exceptionally deadly strain of coronavirus, it's more likely that its mutations will trend in the direction of mean coronavirus lethality.

typeofhuman 2y ago

[flagged]

herschel113 2y ago

Paper puts concerns into vaccine dangers, which I am positive about to look at. But it's emphasis on vaccines seems cherry picked to me - their own excessive-death-by-country table shows countries with late / low vaccination (mostly eastern europe) coming out top on excessive deaths. This is not mentioned or explained in the analysis at all.

Bellamy 2y ago

Received: 9 June 2023 Accepted: 20 March 2024 First Published: 3 June 2024 Is it normal that it takes so long to go from Received to Accepted?

PaulKeeble 2y ago
Yes. The NIH intermural study on ME/CFS took well over a year to get published. The sheer volume of papers on Covid/Long Covid et el is staggering too something like 3/4s of a million individual bits of research have been published (all showing its bad news for humans!) and that combined with the doubling of days out sick everyone is enduring due to multiple Covid infections and the brain fog from Long Covid is likely not helping to get things handled quickly.

imwillofficial 2y ago

Huh wonder what it could be

DrNosferatu 2y ago

In Portugal, classic media frequently screams that our national excess mortality "is the absolute highest" in Europe - but omit that was only for a single week in the year, while this link shows that it's actually lower globally in time, and globally lower when compared to the majority of other countries. - What's your experience in your own country about this? We have a state National Health Service good enough to give us those nice real statistics, and, whose tasty business volume (if it were a private enterprise), is yearned by economic groups that have the financial muscle to buy constant Fox-like spin on how state health is "supposedly" so superlative bad, and therefore should be privatized. This paper clearly disproves their narrative - I guess this media narrative is driven 80% by economic interest / ideology - "get rid of the state"; and would even risk 20% by Putin's destabilization efforts.

enslavedrobot 2y ago

Excess deaths are likely related to the effects of lockdowns. The lack of exercise and mental stress suffered by the elderly over the course of the pandemic was huge. Check out Sweden, they had limited/no lockdowns, very high vaccination rate and low post pandemic excess deaths. Before the pandemic dad was a beast then he watched TV for 2 years and turned into a shuffling hunchback.

t0bia_s 2y ago

Why flagging this study? There are plenty more that monitor side effects of vaccines. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267340#40267364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267340#40267364