From Covid or with covid (edit: I’m merely asking which stat you’re citing. Source?)? Ie the disease killed them or they tested positive while dying from something else?
There have been clear excess deaths (mortality rate increases) from all causes combined during waves. Most evaluations of excess deaths that I've seen conclude that Covid deaths are undercounted not over counted.
Do we say "death from car accidents" or "death with car accident"? Do we discount terminal cancer patients, diabetics and asthmatics from car accident stats because they had a preexisting condition? In the case of covid as with car accidents, it's a distinction without a difference. Yes people are more predisposed to die from covid because of them, but analyses of all-causes excess mortality do not support the hypothesis that there is a large difference between deaths with covid and deaths from covid.
EDIT: except when there isn't enough testing, which underreported deaths with covid towards the beginning of the pandemic.
the interesting thing I've found about those circles is that the followup is never discussed. they just stick with the earlier information and make it the hill they want to die on.
over the past 15 months, many organizations (including the CDC) municipalities (including within the US in democrat and republican areas) and countries have revisited old deaths and current death recording practices, in direct response to this observation and criticism
most times they end up finding more COVID deaths, different ones in greater quantity than the incorrectly recorded ones that shouldn't have been counted. sometimes there is a slight temporary downward death count adjustment. and more importantly, the aggregate stats everywhere already account for this. when news reports X-hundred thousand death milestone, its already factored in the corrected numbers.
what seems most important to me is that all ailments, especially respiratory ones, have the same recording and accounting discrepancies. if the aforementioned "those circles" were also the "just the flu" circles, then the gravity of COVID relative to the flu (or anything else) would still be seen from the original flawed recording standard, because all prior year’s flu numbers are polluted the same way. makes it hard to view those circles as a better alternative to listen to, when the flaws of the established authorities still point to an aggregate good enough signal.
Methodologies vary, but comparing deaths to any of the previous years, it is clear that they've increased. And the only major change was the new virus.
But of course, never let a good chance go to waste. We'll see an increase in restrictions because of Covid, they're not going away anytime soon.
The major change, at least in my country, is that healthcare is so focused on COVID that they are neglecting patients with other diseases. So the excess deaths are mostly effect of that.
There is limited capacity to provide care for people. If people are without COVID dying because COVID cases are taking up that capacity, then COVID is a factor in those deaths as well.
One of the earliest fears about the spread of COVID was exactly this issue: too many cases would overwhelm the healthcare system and cause deaths to rise even more. Even if we couldn't stop the spread of the virus, one of the goals was to slow it down to keep the number of simultaneous cases to a minimum.
should they leave the covid patients in the hallways? whats the alternative? people dying from overloaded hospitals has always been the concern, ever since “flatten the curve”
your point here seems to be that people aren't doing that
who is "they" in your opinion, because plenty of people and organizations do cite excess death stats
are you really so far removed that you need us to provide a citation on excess deaths, this far into things? this reminds me of conversations in May 2020, because this entire conversation was procedurally generated in May 2020. Have you considered the possibility that all your apps marginalized you in this niche where no other information is shown to you everyday for the past year?
> In your opinion, how important are the lives of people aged 65 and older?
I think you intended that as a rhetorical question but I want to point out that in the UK the NHS has calculated the "worth" of a single quality-adjusted life year. If a treatment gives less quality-adjusted extra life years than it costs, it isn't administered. In 2014 it was £20-60k [1]. This shows the NHS definitely does consider older peoples' lives worth less than younger peoples', on average.
Understood, though I'd point out that other insurance schemes will have similar sorts of calculations (either directly or indirectly in the form of premiums/annual limits in the US), so the specificity of the NHS isn't particularly helpful here, as it's one model among many.
Also, based on my casual skimming of this article: https://www.nice.org.uk/process/pmg6/chapter/assessing-cost-..., this particular model evaluates other factors beyond age (such as health history) and is in the context of providing specific treatments for specific conditions rather than broader actions for disease prevention.
But yes, my question was rhetorical, in the sense that I've read far too much casual acceptance of the deaths of older people on HN, as if this ~15% of the population [in the US at least] are freely expendable.
> I've read far too much casual acceptance of the deaths of older people on HN, as if this ~15% of the population [in the US at least] are freely expendable.
I don't think most people on HN implying such things mean to say old people are freely expendable, but rather that they should not be saved at _all cost_. Our non-pharmaceutical interventions have a cost associated with them too, so we have to strike a balance that's acceptable. The debate to me is ultimately over where the line is. It's not helped that the true costs of lockdowns etc. (or indeed the true cost of not locking down) are not actually all that clear. One consequence is that debates over policies such as these have happened without reliable figures on both sides, and have therefore descended into unconstructive emotional arguments.
I agree, most people aren’t saying that (my wording was “too much”). I also suspect that the majority of people on all sides are not arguing whether or not to save lives at “all cost” —- this seems to be a partisan distortion of the actual debate that is occurring among serious people (much like the similarly egregious “granny killer” reference elsewhere in these comments).
There are real arguments and a real, valid debate here on the limits of a government’s influence upon its citizens, while also fulfilling its tacit obligation to maintain a reasonably stable society in a chaotic world, and in a form where its citizens are free to assemble other organizations with their own forms of governance and capacity to encourage actions among their own members. But the debate seems to be projected onto a shape increasing in magnitude, but decreasing in dimension, flatting nuanced arguments into more extreme, tangential versions of themselves. People end up speaking different languages, where all words contain other tacit assumptions which are unstated but differ greatly depending on the speaker/listener.
Well said. As for a good place to discuss this stuff, my view is that, to misappropriate the Churchill quote, HN is the worst place I've found for debating COVID matters except for all the other places I've found. At least most people here, being predominantly from scientific and engineering backgrounds, are capable of and willing to remove emotion from debate and assess the biases inherent in arguments on both sides.
I'm tired of people pretending that everyone on the planet is expendable except Americans.
There are elderly people dying in other countries and perfectly healthy Americans are lining up for the vaccines and acting righteous about saving granny when the reality is they're doing it in their own self-interest.
On a reread, I see that my comment is ambiguous and could have suggested that I believe Americans were more worth protecting. Sorry for that, I didn’t intend that reading. >15% of the US population is >=6 age 65. I’m more familiar with US numbers so I used that.
I disagree with you, even in your hypothetical situation. I'd gladly wear a mask to protect 97-year-old obese smokers, if they were a vulnerable group. I feel like you invented this group to distance the vulnerable population from "us", but it just makes it sound like you have no empathy for other humans.
I don't claim to have all the answers, but I think wearing a mask is a reasonable accommodation and barely an inconvenience. Same goes for FDA-approved vaccines.
Reductio ad absurdum doesn't always work in the real world, so your hazmat scenario just sounds silly.
Going to gym is barely an inconvenience. Mortality would have been minimal if fat people would jump on a treadmill occasionally and keep the cheeseburgers out of their face.
"What is inconvenient" is subjective and that's the ultimate slippery slope argument.
Your argument and thinking is so so bad, I feel like I'm being trolled.
"Your haz mat argument is silly because I say it is. My argument is not silly because I say it's not."
This absolute state of critical thinking in America...
I can't wait till the media stops covering covid and everyone forgets that covid exists because they're on to the next thing the medium easily manipulates them over.
My point is that your attempt at a logical argument misses a number of externalities. My refusal to engage is because you're acting like a jerk, not because I can't construct a proof.
While you marvel at the "state of critical thinking" I am astounded by your lack of empathy.
