Comment by fluffything | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fluffything | Hacker News Reader

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> Apart from clear differences in how people act in public spaces when sick, and countries "count" differently.

The only solid metric for COVID-19 deaths is excess mortality, that is, the actual number of deaths - the statistically expected number of deaths (e.g. extrapolating from the last 2-5 years).

This metric is independent of testing capacity and malicious actors like politicians just outright lying to the public to try to save face. You can "hide" dead people, but doing so is much harder than hiding COVID-19 related deaths.

You can't conclude from this metric what the source of all these extra deaths are, but if they are not caused by COVID-19, every alternative explanation I can think of is even worse than a global pandemic.

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/16/tracking...

https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06...

https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

I get it that this metric sounds to be the only good one, but lockdowns surely have minimized certain other deaths (car accidents, etc.). Thoughts? (Haven't read the links, or articles, so it might be mentioned there)

The data shows that these two do not balance each other out. Otherwise there would be no excess mortality, or it would be negative, i.e., less deaths. From just looking at this metric, we can't tell - but other metrics like car accidents per month per capita do show that this is the case.

One interesting thing is that COVID-19 lowers the mortality rate in the mid-to-long term. It disproportionately targets the weakest, so in the next couple of months and years, less people than the expected average will die, because the weakest are already dead, and that will lower the mortality rate per capita for one generation at least. At some point, it will hopefully raise again, and that too will be due to COVID-19, because the reason for that will be that we wouldn't have a recent-enough COVID-19-like event.

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Point being, one should be careful when comparing mortality rates and absolute death counts. One needs to factor in both to get the full picture, and for rate, the period over which the rate is computed is very relevant.

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