35% of excess deaths from pandemic not caused by Covid-19
medicalnewstoday.com
medicalnewstoday.com
- the virus can also cause death by exacerbating underlying health issues; the body’s immune system is weakened while fighting off the illness.
- the sudden emergence and rapid spread of the disease overwhelmed critical care units when the virus was at its peak, reducing the amount of care any individual patient could receive.
And the argument of "35% excess deaths not caused by COVID-19" is perhaps technically correct due to the reasons above, however, those are indirect deaths that had the root cause of SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus. Notice the difference between COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2? The former is the disease, the latter is the virus.
As Dr. Mike Hansen said in a few of his autopsy report review videos he made in his YouTube channel[1], there are very few direct cause of death in the death certificate he signed and issued for his ICU patients, most related to blood clots and lack of oxygen but the common indirect cause is the SARS-CoV-2. In other words, if it weren't for the coronavirus infection, these deaths could either be prevented or delayed.
So I think it's more nuanced than simply saying we are attributing 35% the excess deaths to COVID-19 whereas these are indirectly caused by SAR-CoV-2 viral outbreak.
From the article:
>there were 96% more diabetes-related deaths than experts predicted. For heart disease, the figure was 89%; for Alzheimer’s disease, it was 64%; and for stroke, it was 35%.
>As well as people not being able to get the necessary treatment due to hospitals being overloaded, the study authors also speculate that people may have stayed at home due to the virus despite experiencing worsening symptoms of another condition they may have had.
>They also believe that the pandemic’s effects on people’s mental health may have played a part.
>As Prof. Woolf notes: “We can’t forget about mental health. A number of people struggling with depression, addiction, and very difficult economic conditions caused by lockdowns may have become increasingly desperate, and some may have died by suicide. People addicted to opioids and other drugs may have overdosed.”
Occam's Razor can help here. We know that there are treatments for these ailments that can help people. We know these treatments stopped due to lockdown and people being afraid to go to hospitals. We know this must, but implication, increase deaths from these ailments.
The alternative explanation is far more complex, actually it's of unbounded complexity because as far as I know there isn't any clear known mechanism of action that shows how this type of virus can cause all these different kinds of problems. Is there even a robust set of studies that show how this type of virus causes blood clots? As far as I know there is some evidence that blood thinners can help a bit with flu, sometimes, so it's not entirely implausible, but I think it's also unknown what exactly happens there and why. And people keep saying this virus is totally unlike flu so that similarity should maybe be discarded.
Are these the driving forces behind increased clots etc? Maybe not. Maybe its contributing equally with people staying at home, or maybe not at all. But the mechanistic reasons for the broad symptoms are there and they're relatively straightforward, driven by the ability of the virus to infect lots of different cells and the variability of the human immune system
[0]https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2020/07/what-is-known-ab...
Had several bad scares that I didn’t go in that I really should have.
Finally had a bad enough scare that I went to ER. Apparently heart isn’t doing great, or heading in that direction. I was stable enough to go home. With strict instructs to get additional testing in day’s.
Yet I’m Having major problems getting access to a cardiologist due to everything.
So yea, i lucked out in getting stable right before things shut down. But having a seriously hard time getting any follow up care.
So at a certain point this shutdown will kill me. And I’m fairly young.
So I have to balance virus risk with the more likely death due to lack of care.
At least in my area, hospitals are nearly over-the-top in terms of separating people who have symptoms, going in for tearing, and those going in for anything else. Separate entrances, separate waiting areas, no visitors, multiple tests required prior to non emergency treatments, etc.
Of course, if you can't find a specialist at all, that is a very different story.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/health-53310007/they-paused-my...
Despite many trips to Er and doctors complaining of stroke symptoms.
A simple blood thinner resolved so many problems for me.
Turns out there’s a big range of clot sizes. From micro ones that have very brief problems, to the sort that kill you in minutes. Hospitals can only really catch them when they are about to kill you, or just after.
OK, I read this as two separate things that should not be described in the same "35%" statistic.
In the former, the virus caused hospital overload specifically due to rising cases of the virus, or virus-related exacerbation of underlying disease.
In the latter, people's perception of the threat of hospitals, which were hotbeds for the virus, caused them not to seek treatment in hospitals.
Case #1 is attributable to the virus. Case #2 is indirect, but I'd argue that those same people would have also been somewhat impacted given that A) it's possible the hospital they avoided was overloaded and B) it's possible the hospital they avoided was a hotbed where they could have contracted the virus. There's also that C) they could have received successful treatment, but how can we measure that? For (A) and (B), the outcome was still death.
I imagine that the people who chose to stay home are in a set where it wasn't obvious that staying home meant death. Thus, I think it was a good bet given what we know about coronavirus complications, spreadability, and virulence.
Maybe the author is forgetting that this is the reason people wanted to track excess deaths in the first place.
Nor can you assume that all of these deaths are simply undetected Covid-19 deaths. We simply don't know what percent of the 35% are caused by Covid-19 and what percent are caused by the lockdown and/or people being too scared to seek treatment. All we know is that there is an additional 35% in excess deaths.
Suicide is not responsible for any appreciable fraction of that 35%. The article doesn't mention suicide at all, and it would be so extraordinarily anomalous if suicides were suddenly on par with heart disease that that would be the only possible title of this article if they were.
Also, I already quoted it above. You said all of the things mentioned were comorbidities. They aren't.
1) In Wuhan, when the primary care taker(s) of a child or a disabled or elderly person suddenly become hospitalized and there's no opportunity to arrange backup care, there were many stories of when dependent is found deceased later.
2) Sometimes, a month or two after someone 'fully recovers' from Covid-19, they experience a blood clot. If that clot results in a stroke or heart attack...
3) Sometimes a Covid-19 survivor has organ damage significant enough to be on a transplant list. Due to fewer car accidents, the organ supply isn't what it used to be in the BC era...
I think we need to be apply critical thinking to claims of the form, "some one recovered fully but then was struck down by covid19 a second time". That can easily be a correlation/causation fallacy.
It's not any longer and written in clearer language.
The paper simply summarizes the reported causes of excess death.
All the comparisons I've seen this year have been using the 24,000-62,000 flu estimate uncritically when comparing to COVID-19, but apples to apples is apparently 15,620 for flu and 132,056 for COVID-19[1].
Perhaps flu-like estimates will come later, since the CDC tends to wait until the end of flu seasons to release those numbers. We're clearly nowhere near the end of COVID-19 season.
[0] https://news.yahoo.com/flu-deaths-were-counted-covid-0534499...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/case...
COVID-19 is new, and was barely getting started in March. Despite early claims that it would definitely taper off in the summer, apparently based on the fact that the flu does, it is not tapering off at all. We have no idea when COVID-19 will taper off, or if it will before herd immunity is reached (with or without a vaccine).
So we don't know yet when the end will be, and they have different dates because they are different viruses.
Those people died because of the virus, and the cost of the virus in lives should be measured that way.
The 35% are from people who supposedly recovered from Covid-19 but died later from complications or a weakened body. I still would call that Covid-19 deaths.
In the same way that if you fall, break your leg, and later die from infection, we can still say that the fall caused your death, even though what sealed your fate is a bacteria and not mechanical damage.
For example, consider how many people delayed a cancer screening or treatment in the last few months. If anyone who loses a month of life to respiratory disease is a “COVID death”, then anyone who loses a year to cancer, because they waited to treat it, is a “lockdown death”, right?
What about the 26 year old dancer that will never be able to perform at the same level that she did before getting infected unless we manage to find a new medical technique to remove her lung scars? Will she work at Macdonald's now? Europe is mostly out of lockdown right now and yes, lockdown caused deaths too. But look at the addict admission to the hospital in Strsabourg/Mulhouse/Colmar and those in Britanny during the lockdown. Not having a crisis and only a lockdown did kill people, but not nearly as much as havong a crisis. In colmar, they had to close 3/4 or their bed usually used for alcoholic coma and/or OD. Im pretty sure it wasn't the case in Britanny.
Maybe you're right about the lockdown in the US though. It might have flattened the curve enough in some state and might have been useless in others, but it is obviously not working as well as it did in europe.
My specific gripe is not with the lockdowns themselves, but with how the hospitals have reacted by essentially abandoning anyone who suffers from other diseasese.
Of course the distinction matters from a biological and medical point of view, but from a policy point of view all you really need to know is that if coronavirus didn't exist then those deaths wouldn't have happened.
This claim is not accepted by all in the medical or scientific community. This is just the line from the epidemiologists who have the most influence, and it has been amplified by the media into some sort of unquestionable creed. My guess is the damage that these epidemiologists have done is going to be far worse than the disease itself. If you can't see that their over-simplified non-linear models are essentially just guesses too, then you are missing a big part of the picture.
I'm not sure what you mean by "over-simplified non-linear models", please elaborate.
I would say in general though that the problem is not the models but the parameters - this is such a new virus that modellers have to make various assumptions about things that we can't possibly know yet.
No lockdown => hospitals overwhelmed => people can't get care they need or people avoid hospitals to avoid getting sick => excess deaths
Lockdown => hospitals less overwhelmed => people avoid hospitals due to lockdown or to avoid getting sick => excess deaths (but less than the no lockdown scenario)
Here in Austin our medical community is practically begging us to take better precautions because our hospital system is starting to hit capacity due to the second wave we're staring down [1]. Saying it's not 'accepted' in the medical community seems wrong.
>Lockdown => hospitals less overwhelmed => people avoid hospitals due to lockdown or to avoid getting sick => excess deaths (but less than the no lockdown scenario)
Right, but eventually as things taper off there's a crossover point where the first option will have less deaths going forward. Where that crossover point is the point of contention.
Which then means you have to go into lockdown again while people yell at you for going into lockdown not understanding that the alternative was made nonviable due to them not taking basic precautions.
(Genuinely asking, since I wasn't aware epidemiology wasn't a science.)
Depends on the intended use of the information.
Calling them coronavirus deaths and then turning around and using the size of that number as an reason to continue lockdown would be foolhardy at best.
If you're trying to evaluate the impact of the virus on X or you're writing a passage for a history textbook years later I see no problem lumping them in together.
Sure, but I don't think anybody serious is doing that. Obviously people are considering things like this in their models.
But the total number of coronavirus deaths is still useful when trying to measure the effect of a failure to contain the virus. So for example when you want to compare countries/states that locked down early and effectively to countries/states that waited too long, saw a massive spike in deaths and then had to lock down even harder. In that case you don't really care what caused the deaths, you just care about the fact that it appears that you could have avoided them with better policy.
So is attributing overloaded hospitals to "lots of staff in quarantine" given how it looked like in Italy or Spain or New York.
You can't say this. You haven't looked at the stats. England had a lockdown. What stats are you using for the UK?
The US, as far as I have seen, hasn't released any meaningful updates in suicide numbers for 2020, against a backdrop of suicide rates climbing since '99.
It's tragic that suicide is increasing, it really is, but COVID is the far greater threat.
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db362.htm
[2]https://www.statista.com/chart/21170/coronavirus-death-rate-...
Does that mean the other 65% of excess deaths were or "may have been" due to COVID?
There's so many "may" and non specific statements, etc that I'm not at all sure what it is it is saying.