Hacker News Reader

Comment by Viliam1234 | Hacker News Reader

> all these measures that we take will kill many times more people than the disease.

I have seen this claim repeatedly, but always without numbers.

I completely agree that the measures have economic consequences, and the economic consequences will cost lives. But how do you know that the number is greater than the fraction of population killed by the coronavirus?

For example, the coronavirus in Sweden killed 0.05% of the population. Also, at least 0.7% got sick, with various consequences. Could you estimate what fraction of their population have other countries killed by the lockdowns? Ten percent? One percent? Zero point one percent?

View on HN

> But how do you know that the number is greater than the fraction of population killed by the coronavirus?

You can measure it. For example you can look at excess mortality in the UK and then look at what fraction of that excess mortality is directly attributed to COVID.

Lots of people are doing this kind of data analysis on twitter.

Of course the guesswork comes in when you try to imagine how people would have acted without a lockdown.

Without lockdown would people still have gone for non-essential medical checkups for example?

I haven't looked at data from other countries yet. In Slovakia, the total mortality this year is lower than in the comparable period during previous years. I haven't investigated it, but my guess is fewer car accidents, and fewer people dying from the usual contagious diseases.

Of course it is possible that some deaths will come later, such as people who missed their medical checkups, have a condition that could have been cured a few months ago but is fatal now, and are still alive at the moment. I don't really think this is a large part of population.

I also suspect that if you do the simple calculation "excess mortality minus confirmed COVID deaths", this will be an overestimate, because many COVID deaths are misclassified as something else, e.g. pneumonia. And all those misclassified excess deaths would then appear as "victims of lockdown".

> I also suspect that if you do the simple calculation "excess mortality minus confirmed COVID deaths", this will be an overestimate, because many COVID deaths are misclassified as something else, e.g. pneumonia.

I think it depends on the country - a lot of countries are labelling any deaths with COVID symptoms as COVID (even though the symptoms are common to other illnesses like the flu).

In these countries it will likely be an overestimate.

> In Slovakia, the total mortality this year is lower than in the comparable period during previous years.

Yes, COVID has been fairly benign in a lot of countries and a massive killer of the old in others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com