Johns Hopkins published a study saying corona is nbd. They then deleted it.
notthebee.com
notthebee.com
Regardless of if it's correct, I think this has become such a political issue in the US that the American left would be very hard pressed to publicly accept this study's claims.
I really hope that statisticians are able to look past their own personal convictions and look at possible ways our assumptions may have been incorrect. (Personally speaking, I wear a mask, I don't think the coronavirus is a giant conspiracy by the lizard people etc. but I do recognize that the modern scientific community has a tendency to think one way, and then remain cemented in that way for a while.)
At both society and personal levels, the truth is always the best policy. Suppressing the truth, even for an ostensibly good reason, never ends well.
Maybe there's something to the censored article. Maybe there isn't. But whenever I see heavy handed censorship, I have to ask myself, "is there something here?"
However, this doesn't appear to be true search result.
If it is indeed an erroneous conclusion published in a newsletter by JH students, and people implied ("Johns Hopkins published a study") that it was actual research result published by JH staff, then is there anything JH can do to suppress falsehoods that wouldn't be interpreted by the uninformed as heavy handed censorship?
"Briand was quoted in the article as saying, “All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers.” This claim is incorrect and does not take into account the spike in raw death count from all causes compared to previous years. According to the CDC, there have been almost 300,000 excess deaths due to COVID-19. Additionally, Briand presented data of total U.S. deaths in comparison to COVID-19-related deaths as a proportion percentage, which trivializes the repercussions of the pandemic. This evidence does not disprove the severity of COVID-19; an increase in excess deaths is not represented in these proportionalities because they are offered as percentages, not raw numbers.
Briand also claimed in her analysis that deaths due to heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza and pneumonia may be incorrectly categorized as COVID-19-related deaths. However, COVID-19 disproportionately affects those with preexisting conditions, so those with those underlying conditions are statistically more likely to be severely affected and die from the virus.
Because of these inaccuracies and our failure to provide additional information about the effects of COVID-19, The News-Letter decided to retract this article. It is our duty as a publication to combat the spread of misinformation and to enhance our fact-checking process. We apologize to our readers."
That's rather clear and unequivocal. Reading that, in conjunction with the original article and other science papers, it appears clear that none of that minimizes in any way the impact of the pandemic if you know how to read those sources properly. That is apparently not the case for everyone.
We're talking about something published by a student in an undergraduate newspaper.
The information I've looked at is clearly wrong, as I've highlighted elsewhere in these comments.
I used "suppress" because you wrote "suppress true research results" - given your qualifiers, I assumed you thought suppression was appropriate for other contexts.
For example, isn't retracting a paper a way suppress the propagation of egregiously wrong research results?
What this says is that in 2020 they didn't see the same numbers that they've always seen. Heart disease death counts aren't as high as they've always been. But wow, take a look at covid - those numbers are WAY up. To the observer who wants to say that covid isn't bad and is just the left's fever dream, this is the proof in the pudding.
To the intelligent, highly educated left, this says "Covid is the biggest cause of death in 2020. The right is just looking for something else to point at because Trump said so."
I believe the article is saying something, but it's not saying the right thing. Covid, in 2020, has been the biggest killer. Trying to identify an alternative cause is just wishful thinking.
I'm not sure it even counts as a study, where was it published? Is there a preprint somewhere? Is it just a PowerPoint presentation?
It's not an ad hominem to try to deflate an appeal to authority by pointing out that the authority is not all it's cracked up to be, and that the extent of the supposed study is some charts.
Additionally, the Applied Economics master’s degree program is an adult extension program located on a satellite campus. Its student admission requirements [1] are substantially less rigorous than a traditional master's program at one of JHU's main schools.
I agree the headline here is completely misleading, as it attempts to tie the content to other schools/divisions of JHU that have a much more solid academic reputation.
[1] https://advanced.jhu.edu/academics/graduate/ms-applied-econo...
Just how valuable is it to be a credible person, especially if you want to make an impact in the world, such as by being a doctor or researcher?
That is what any serious institution would do.
The charts "Weekly number of deaths (from all causes)" shows it's a big deal.
Or, select the dashboard "Excess deaths with and without COVID-19" and see that the number of deaths without COVID is pretty close to the expected number of deaths, and not a drop that would compensate for the COVID deaths.
You can also see that while the linked-to site claims "The CDC classified all deaths that are related to COVID-19 simply as COVID-19 deaths.", the CDC writes:
> For example, in some cases, COVID-19 may have contributed to the death, but the underlying cause of death was another cause, such as terminal cancer. For the majority of deaths where COVID-19 is reported on the death certificate (approximately 95%), COVID-19 is selected as the underlying cause of death.
Furthermore, the CDC write "deaths from all causes excluding COVID-19 were also estimated. Comparing these two sets of estimates — excess deaths with and without COVID-19 — can provide insight about how many excess deaths are identified as due to COVID-19, and how many excess deaths are reported as due to other causes of death."
Since the surface-level description contradicts easily available evidence, why do you believe the rest of the details are any more meaningful?
I have previously poked around NYC-area death statistics and it looks like 1) a massive spike in deaths by any cause that looks like several 9/11s followed by 2) a regression to the usual rate of deaths once COVID was largely brought to heel in the summer months. I can't imagine that the total number of deaths in NYC this year could possibly be the same as in 2019.
But I'm not an expert.
Ed: glancing over the CDC statistics, when COVID-attributed deaths go up, all-cause mortality goes up, too... by approximately the same amount. If a large proportion of those COVID deaths were mislabeled heart disease deaths, why is that? I made these graphs with the same CDC data:
And of course, there's the CDC's own dashboard on excess deaths, which lets you slice this more finely.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
This directly contradicts the excess mortality data published by CDC itself. [1] From the article it's unclear to me what evidence led to the claims presented. So far the article seems very unconvincing. Seems like John Hopkins has good reasons to take it down.
Also bear in mind that the excess mortality we've seen so far is with all the measures to limit the impact of the pandemic. It's fair to assume that excess mortality would be a lot higher without those. Our World In Data has a well explained international overview and analysis. [2][3]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
I don't see "nbd" that often, and I suspect most Hacker News readers aren't going to realize what "nbd" is either. I opened the article because I thought "nbd" was some medical or scientific term.
The mangled graph shown in the article was edited by the original authors, not the journalist.
the reported differences are interesting no matter how you cut it, either covid isn't as bad, or it is bad and people aren't dying of certain other causes. Alternatively the US really sucks at counting.
The censorship over all discussion about covid unless it specifically goes along with the politician's story. Then a huge number of tyrannical measures 'for our safety' and it doesn't look quite right. It makes everyone question what's going on.
Want to fix the entire situation? Take the politicians out of the equation.
I found it quite interesting, but it sounded more like a reason to investigate than a result of investigation. For example, some non-Corona treatments are happening in much lower numbers than usually; how "should" that affect the number of deaths from the relevant causes and what numbers are actually observed? It's not sensible to draw conclusions about Corona from the number of other-cause deaths without also looking at the changes to other-cause reasons and treatments.
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
Is there a similar graph for the US? I couldn't find it on CDC website
If we didn't take proactive measures, deaths from Covid 19 would be a huge deal.
Of course a one off non-peer reviewed piece isn't proof of anything but it does reference interesting data.
Heart disease, influenza, and pneumonia really are things that kill every year, so why don't you think they can be statistically analyzed? This year is different than previous years, but it seems odd if you're suggesting Covid is beneficial for heart disease.
Clearly a counterfactual that you can easily say without the burden of offering evidence.