> The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show the number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 6 November 2020 was 14.3% higher than the five-year average.
But it is good to know that the measures to control COVID-19 are also suppressing flu and pneumonia (though not enough to make up for COVID-19 mortality).
Edit: "So far this year, up to 6 November, 517,650 people have died from any cause in England and Wales. This is 58,555 more than the five-year average." So the definitely seasonality adjusted excess mortality for the year to date is about 12.7% (or 12.4% possibly, depending on how the leap day was handled).
I should warn you that you might have to scroll a little, lest you find yourself writing a comment in response before you read section 2.
Instead vast swathes of the U.S. and other countries flout even the most basic precautions making it impossible for the rest of us to live normal lives.
The argument that being safe == poor quality of life presents a false dichotomy. The truth is that we can be safe _and_ have the same quality of life. Instead many have chosen the third option: they believe that their "right" to shop at Walmart without an extra piece of clothing is more important than people being able to say goodbye to loved ones; more important than their neighbor's wellbeing; more important than the economy.
I would further argue that not only would quality of life not suffer if everyone took basic precautions, in many ways QoL would be _better_. As the statistics are showing we've seen a massive dropoff in cold/flu related deaths, even with poorly implemented COVID protections. Less auto accidents and less pollution. A rise in work from home. The list goes on.
Contrary to the doom and gloom of this year, COVID was really a chance to build a better world. We might just yet do it in small ways. But much of the potential good is being squandered, as it always is, by selfish, ignorant, hateful people.
Anyone advocating that as the goal for society needs to present a plan that has a high chance of succeeding without an unreasonable burden being placed on society. I think maybe the development and mass-deployment of rapid tests for the virus could achieve that, but ironically we don't see much emphasis on this strategy by lockdown advocates. It's almost as if the opposition to the lockdown is all the proof needed to convince some of its advocates that it's the right strategy.
On a side note, we now we see that the lockdown advocates have simply switched their rationale for the lockdown, from "flatten the curve", to "eliminate the virus from the population", once the curve was flattened. For those who believe society is better off being tightly controlled, with heavy restrictions on individuals to achieve larger goals that benefit the public, the coronavirus is the gift that keeps on giving.
Unfortunately, the politicization has turned this issue into a binary decision with bad outcomes on both ends. I think there is a place for people to engage in a more "normal" life even in the context of the pandemic...but it's hard to define that space in 2020.
Also, in my view, the covidiots aren't the people that wish they could be with their sick or dying relatives/friends. Those are the people that absolutely refuse (as a matter of principle) to do the bare minimum to help contain this...or worse, the people who pack clubs, parties, etc fantasizing that his pandemic doesn't really exist.
What? What led you to come up with that absurd baseless assertion? I see or saw no such thing ever anywhere. Ever.
What I do see is people forced to social distancing and into lockdowns because irresponsible, egocentric, and outright sociopath people have been perpetually and actively contributing for the disease to spread far and wide due to their apalling behavior.
It's certainly more than last year, or the year before that, but it's not an outlier for the last two decades.
5 year average: 28,140 deaths
2020 so far: 18,325 deaths (does not include November and December!)
COVID 2020: 53,675 deaths
So while it does seem to be killing some people who would've died from the flu/pneumonia anyway, it's still nearly double the 5 year average which would make it one hell of a bad flu strain.
The western world is much more cavalier when it comes to the flu and cold viruses (shopping and coming into work sick, not wearing masks on public transport, etc.)
I think the measures account for the lower flu/pneumonia deaths as a side effect.
COVID-19 is not a type of the flu, in the same way that a human is not a type of bat.
> In this study of a cohort of German patients recently recovered from COVID-19 infection, CMR revealed cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%), independent of preexisting conditions, severity and overall course of the acute illness, and time from the original diagnosis. These findings indicate the need for ongoing investigation of the long-term cardiovascular consequences of COVID-19.
Note that this study includes a group of COVID survivors who have recently recovered, and 2 control groups: healthy, age-matched participants, and a group of risk-factor matched control patients. It is published in JAMA Cardiology.
Obviously, this study doesn't say anything about truly long-term consequences of COVID, but that, IMO, is more because we haven't had time to reach "long-term" status yet. I would give it at least another 6 months to a year before making up my mind about the incidence of long-term consequences.
COVID-19 is particularly hard on the elderly, which is by no means an inevitable fact about epidemics. Every person who dies of this disease would have lived longer, which makes their death a tragedy: but how much longer?
Cards on the table: my suspicion is that we won't. I could be wrong, particularly if recovering from the disease shortens lifespans for an appreciable number of patients. We'll know when we know.
Like what is the point of comparing flu deaths between January and August with Covif219 deaths in the same time period? Perhaps those two diseases have different seasons? (Maybe not, but they way they present it, it is impossible to know). Perhaps all the flu deaths happen in December and all the Corona deaths in March? (Just an example). Also for example Sweden had exceptionally few deaths last years, leaving exceptionally many people "ripe to die" this year (what Marginal Revolution calls the "Dry Cinder Effect").
Also comparing to averages can also be very misleading. It is in fact to be expected that any given year deviates from the average. It would be very odd if every year was exactly on the average.
Then in the middle of comparing death rates of previous years, they seem to jump to absolute counting of Covid19 deaths again ("The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show"). When the whole point of looking a death rates of previous years is to establish how many excess deaths were really attributable to Covid19.
Here are some proper curves where you can see the UK (England) problem: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#z-scores-by-country
And compare to other countries with a similar failing nursing system, to the ones with a proper one.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Yes, the world has become a safer place to live in over the years.
Given the downward trend in age adjusted deaths per million over time, it makes a lot of sense to compare only the most recent years to 2020.
See here to compare monthly mortality rates for every country in 2020 to the the prior 5 year period: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
If the data only looks bad when you look at 5 year window, and not 20 year window, that seems like a pretty fragile argument.
If you compare it with 1666, this is paradise.
The twitter thread linked above is from August, so definitely does not account for these rapidly changing numbers.
(Recent data is available all over the place--here's one source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ )
[Edit]
And what is "Age Adjusted + Population Adjusted Deaths"? (Yes, I get "population adjusted".)
[As of 2019, Sweden's population has increased 16% since 2000, 13% in the 0-17 yrs and 35% in 65+ yrs groups. The population of "Foreign Born" is up 97% (!) vs 11% growth in Swedish citizens. In that time, life expectancy has gone from 77.4 to 81.3 for men, 82.0 to 84.7 for women. "Crude death rate" has gone from 10.5 to 8.6 (per 1000). Source: https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje... As a bottom line, I'd suggest Sweden's demographics changes in the last 20 years have been crazy pants.]
These rates change in 2020, but the proportion of the population in these age groups changes, too. So you set a baseline proportion (maybe equal to 2019), compute the per-age-group death rates in 2020, and rescale the total death rate so that the age proportions are the same as the 2019 baseline.
The ultimate goal is to correct for the effects of changing age demographics in computing the death rate. You'd use it if want to look at changes that are corrected for, for example, the population as a whole aging.
Looking at the outliers Norway, Denmark on one side and Peru and Ecuador is so much more interesting: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...
Even at that take a look at the last few columns, more particularly the slope from month to month in the last couple years. Note how from July 2019 through March 2020 the levels were at or below the previous years, however in the last few months the slope accelerates to an increasing upward monthly trend. I would be quite curious to see this chart with August, Sept, and Oct 2020 data included to see if that acceleration continued. Consider this is what Sweden's case count has looked like: https://i.imgur.com/ofUhXvK.png
In essence this chart is really showing only about 4 months of pandemic influence, and at a time when Sweden was doing pretty well. But in those last 4 months there is a clear accelerating trend in relation to the previous years. I won't say this was cherry picked to be misleading, but at the least it is an incomplete representation of what is happening now.
https://www.travellingtabby.com/scotland-coronavirus-tracker...
Scroll to “Hospital Admissions by Age Group”
So while some scans etc will have been missed for this age group during lockdown, they would also have suffered losses as a result of an overwhelmed health system.
*given that they contract covid
https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/advance-article/doi/10.1...
"Deaths among adults 65 and older accounted for 80% of excess YLL in April but only 36% of excess YLL in June. Since April, working age adults 20-64 have accounted for 47% of excess YLL, and males 20 to 64 have contributed 34%."
https://healthcostinstitute.org/hcci-research/the-impact-of-...
Calculated total deaths, 2015 (pop. 64.85 million): 595,258.15; 2020 (pop. 67.89 million): 639,048.57.
Difference: 43,790.42. Weekly averages: 11,000 - 12,000.
See Figure 1, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... for a chart of England's excess mortality.
"In week 16 2020, an estimated 22,351 all-cause deaths were registered in England and Wales (source: Office for National Statistics). This is an increase compared to the 18,516 estimated death registrations in week 152020. ... In the devolved administrations,no statistically significant excess all-cause mortality for all ages was observed for Northern Ireland or Wales in week 17. Statistically significant excess all-cause mortality for all ages was observed for Scotland in week 15." (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...)
It looks like the peak occurred in week 17, with 22,351 deaths.
The spike in deaths from the UK's first wave is pretty visible in the graphs, and the spike from cases we're seeing now will probably take a few weeks to show up in the data.
For that calculation stddev is in the denominator and whether it's 2%, 4% or 6% makes a huge difference, notable or not.
The best explanation is that Germany and similar countries just have proper healthcare for seniors, esp. the retirement homes. The protected the vulnerable better. The bad countries are all united in cost cuts in those homes and healthcare. France, Belgium, UK, Spain, NL, Italy, US, Brazil. Belgium had the highest IFR due to not enough masks for caregivers. They had to share it. Spain et al also destroyed their previously excellent systems with the recent rightwing governments.
Socialism is apparently the best cure for COVID-19. Even if Germany is extremely rightwing, they still have proper healthcare and caregiving infrastructure.
I think a study of a general population sample for mental health issues with or without a prior COVID-19 diagnosis would show how varying the COVID-19 patients experiences are vs how everyone else is fairing.
I’m not a scientist or a therapist so I don’t know the exact approach to use to do the comparison but I suspect it could be done.
There's no reason to believe that cancers missed in the past 8 months would have appreciably immediate consequences as there's not much that can be done about late stage cancers. Plus, like suicide, cancer deaths are obvious and I haven't seen any substantial increase in those numbers.
Finally, studies from just a couple of months ago studying cardiovascular disease deaths showed that there's been a decrease in those deaths. It's hypothesized that deaths from early intervention (e.g. bypass surgery) have been avoided, and the expected increase from untreated disease is still further out. Even if deaths from untreated CVD are finally upon us (post study period), it wouldn't substantially effect mortality numbers from the previous 8-month period.
In other words, it's easy to subtract these things from all-cause mortality. But AFAIK doing so doesn't significantly change the numbers.
Furthermore, there's little reason to doubt the potential lethality of COVID-19, given the hard and indisputable CFRs and IFRs from Italy, New York, and Wuhan, all of which occurred during a very short period of time, and largely before significant mitigations were put into place. Thus, while mortality rates clearly vary across different regions, there's little reason to believe that this fact alone disputes the inherent lethality of COVID-19, but rather reflects environmental (including social) differences across regions and across time, and thus little reason to believe that mortality increases elsewhere are principally the result of anything but COVID-19.
The sun may never come up tomorrow. Aliens might land and wipe us out in the next hour. You might spontaneously quantum teleport to Alpha Centauri while reading this reply. These are all possibilities. But possibilities aren't probabilities; they're two different things. Merely suggesting that something is possible does not refute the probable likelihood of an alternative. Conflation of those is what makes FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) seem credible to the naive or wanton contrarians.
The evidence for that is quite weak.
From https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352
Overall, the literature on the effect of covid-19 on suicide should be interpreted with caution. Most of the available publications are preprints, letters (neither is peer reviewed), or commentaries using news reports of deaths by suicide as the data source.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2259889-we-need-to-be-m...
In general, it takes longer than nine months to go from cancer screening to death.
We don't actually know that suicides are up, because the data is yearly (which is a problem we should probably solve).
All cause mortality is a rough number, but it's the only one that will eventually allow us to measure the impact of the pandemic in a few years.
The major problem I see is that we currently watch the whole COVID-19 under amicroscope and discover a lot of horrible things. Actually, if you are a researcher, the only way to get attention is by finding horrible things. If we had done the same for epidemics in the past, would we have found horrible things as well?
Exactly. And it's insane to just assume there is long-term damage with no evidence whatsoever.
Also, it would likely be possible to say something about actual long-term damage if it existed by monitoring patients' recovery and extrapolating.
> There is one inevitable conclusion from these studies: COVID infection frequently leads to brain damage — particularly in those over 70. While sometimes the brain damage is obvious and leads to major cognitive impairment, more frequently the damage is mild, leading to difficulties with sustained attention.
> Although many people who have recovered from COVID can resume their daily lives without difficulty — even if they have some deficits in attention — there are a number of people who may experience difficulty now or later. One recently published paper from a group of German and American doctors concluded that the combination of direct effects of the virus, systemic inflammation, strokes, and damage to bodily organs (like lungs and liver) could even make COVID survivors at high risk for Alzheimer’s disease in the future. Individuals whose professions involve medical care, legal advice, financial planning, or leadership — including political leaders — may need to be carefully evaluated with formal neuropsychological testing, including measures of sustained attention, to assure that their cognition has not been compromised.
I think brain damage counts as "long-term damage," don't you?
https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/07/10/more-people-die-winter-...
However, it's interesting to note that during the first ten weeks of 2020, 8% fewer people died in Sweden compared to the average of 2015-2019, and 2020 had in fact the lowest number of deaths of the last six years[1] during the first ten weeks of each year.
[1] https://scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/befolkni... (Excel file, Tabell 5, fairly easy to translate)
The Bible counts bats as birds.
Leviticus 11: 19
“And these you shall detest among the birds;a they shall not be eaten; they are detestable: the eagle, the bearded vulture, the black vulture, the kite, the falcon of any kind, every raven of any kind, the ostrich, the nighthawk, the sea gull, the hawk of any kind, the little owl, the cormorant, the short-eared owl, the barn owl, the tawny owl, the carrion vulture, the stork, the heron of any kind, the hoopoe, and the bat."
https://survlivel.cultu.be/heron-stew
And ostriches are moderately popular now
The goal is not to erradicar the disease. The goal is to take basic measures so that it's incidence and transmission rate are kept low.
Spain achieved that during the first wave, where in a matter of weeks they managed to get the fatality rate from hundreds per day to the single digits, even achieving days without covid-related deaths.
If the disease is contained, we not only avoid the chance of being infected but we also have a shot at normality.
If the disease is not contained and allowed to ravage the world then all we get is the despair of having people dying left and right while hospitals are saturated far beyond capacity and unable to respond to any need.
There is no normality with incredibly disruptive restrictions in place.
>If the disease is not contained and allowed to ravage the world then all we get is the despair of having people dying left and right while hospitals are saturated far beyond capacity and unable to respond to any need.
First of all, the average age of death for the coronavirus is something like 79. For most age groups, the virus is not extremely dangerous - even if it were allowed to spread like wildfire in a population without immunity, far more people under 50 will die from causes other than COVID19 in the virus' first year of exposure to humans. So no, society will not far into despair. 2.8 million people die in the US every year, and people seem to be able to continue to function.
Second, this doesn't go on indefinitely. Eventually people die or recover, with immunity. A population fully subjected to one wave of a virus will be far lessa affected in subsequent waves.
Note that I wasn't arguing for that. My argument is that a few simple, low impact measures would be enough to drop the effective infectivity of the virus low enough that it would fizzle out. There's reason to believe that a simple combination of limiting high-risk social engagements coupled with _strict_, enforced universal face mask requirements would be enough.
That wouldn't 100% eliminate the virus, as it would continue to spread and pool in countries without those guidelines. But for countries that do maintain them it would never gain a foothold.
Keep that up until a vaccine is deployed.
Easy. Low impact on quality of life. That's all I'm arguing.
What's the difference between a virus being extripated from a population, and a virus "fizzling out"?
If it's not extripated, then it will immediately start spreading again as soon as those measures are lifted.
>>That wouldn't 100% eliminate the virus, as it would continue to spread and pool in countries without those guidelines.
Note that I didn't say that you argued for eliminating the virus from the entire world. I said that you are advocating extripating the virus from one particular country, and I argued that that would be extremely difficult to pull off and then maintain by physically isolating that country from the rest of the world.
The goal is to maintain measures until a vaccine arrives, eliminating the threat for any said country.
> I argued that that would be extremely difficult to pull off and then maintain by physically isolating that country from the rest of the world.
You don't need the country to be isolated from the rest of the world. If the effective reproduction (R) of your country's population is below 1 it won't spread there, even if the rest of the world is letting it run wild and free.
And it's likely we can get R below 1 for any given population with just strict mask usage and curtailing some higher risk social activities. That's my argument. We don't need to do messy lockdowns, ruin our social lives, etc. If everyone just got on board with those simple measures instead of being selfish.
> Patients with moderate head injuries fare less well. Approximately 60 percent will make a positive recovery and an estimated 25 percent left with a moderate degree of disability. Death or a persistent vegetative state will be the outcome in about 7 to 10 percent of cases. The remainder of patients will have a severe degree of disability.
Yes of course, but if the crop of vaccines prove, after more extensive usage, ineffective, or if the virus mutates quickly enough to make the currently developed vaccines ineffective, as many coronaviruses have been known to do, it may lead to indefinite on-off lockdowns.
>You don't need the country to be isolated from the rest of the world. If the effective reproduction (R) of your country's population is below 1 it won't spread there, even if the rest of the world is letting it run wild and free.
That only persists as long as the lockdown measures you mentioned are in place. Yes if you maintain those measures indefinitely, you can keep the virus at bay indefinitely, and that's a different claim than I thought you were initially making.
I'm not sure, with the speed of technological improvements in the last decade, that 20 years is appropriate.
Seems appropriate to me.
https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...
Aside from 2018, this year does not even look like much of an outlier: https://mobile.twitter.com/TLennhamn/status/1295269505984344... . 2012 seems to have been deadlier, for Sweden, than 2020, which was 8 years ago.
Directly comparing 2000 to 2020 makes little sense given the consistent downward trend and magnitude of difference between 2001-2005 and 2015-2019.
Given the downward trend in adjusted deaths per million over time, a more reasonable approach is to average the last 5 years and compare it to 2020. Doing so, you will find that 2020 has ~750 more deaths per million in Sweden than prior periods. (Keep in mind this approach likely understates the affect of COVID on mortality rate due to the aforementioned trend).
For example, before we decide that the last 5 years are a good average we should look at what the trend of the last 5 years looked like. If for example there was an upwards trend (which it was for many countries around the world) then even without COVID you'd expect that 2020 would have continued on that trend for whatever reason it was going that way. In that case it would be fairly unexciting to say that 2020 was above the 5 year average in the context of COVID.
In my opinion the fairest comparison would be to check if 2020 continued the trend of the last 5 years, or if it had a non linear jump upwards from that trend, but looking at figures such as "above average" doesn't mean anything if every year in the last 5 years was "above average" because it started to trend upwards again.
https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...
Looking at one county's stats and ignoring all others is making a fragile counter-argument on worldwide death rates.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/death-rate
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/average-age-of-coronaviru...
Covid deaths are practically concentrated on age groups over 65 years old.
People dying from other causes aggregate multiple causes which, due to the aggregation, are spread out over the whole age range.
Due to the pyramid shape of the population distribution (they call it population pyramid for a reason) then the median and the mean are shifted towards the base/younger age groups.
Hell, if a disease affected mankind in a way that killed everyone uniformly, the average age of people dying would be around 30 years old.
The way you presented your conclusion implies that dying from covid actually extends your life, which is absurd.
Instead, it just reads that it kills older people disproportionately, and the older you are the more likely you are of dying from it.
If you look at the mobility data [1], you'll see that Sweden followed a very similar trend to its neighbors, and actually maintained lower mobility after other state-mandated lockdowns let up.
[1] https://www.teliacompany.com/sv/om-foretaget/uppdatering/mob...
