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Comment by aeternum | Hacker News Reader

It's always hard to argue that we should do less when it comes to saving lives, but perhaps a better way to look is whether we're focused on the right thing.

In 2019, heart disease killed 18.6 million people whereas Covid has taken 2.9 million lives. Heart disease is also a major factor in severe Covid cases. Couldn't we save more lives if we took all this governmental effort that we are putting towards tiered business closures and mask mandates and instead focused it on national, maybe even mandatory exercise programs?

On average, people were about 6x more likely to die of heart disease than covid over this last year, yet we take comparatively little if any action.

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> people were about 6x more likely to die of heart disease than covid

Could you add a link to where you get those numbers from. What the link below says is that "Covid-19 is the Number One Cause of Death in the U.S. in Early 2021".

If Covid-19 is the number one cause of death, how could heart-disease be 6x more likely cause of death?

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/covid-19-is-the-nu...

Take care when interpreting this kind of data. Even if it were true that Covid-19 is the number one cause of death for 2020, you can make a strong case that this number contains a significant number of unhealthy people which would have died from heart disease & al in the near future. This means that covid effectively "steals" death from a category in the short term. Which would mean that heart disease is still a bigger long term/overall issue than Covid.

Plus this doesn't take into account the reporting bias that seems to have been (be?) prevalent in 2019.

(Although it seems heart disease was still bigger than covid for 2020 [1] if compared to 2019 [2] in the us)

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+death+covid+2020+u... - 561k covid [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm - 659k heart disease

I mean you can do the opposite. People who die from heart disease might be more at risk of other things (obese, etc) and are also likely to be old, no?

Yes, but it's not a short-term boost like with Covid.

I mean it in that Covid will look worse and heart disease better on a short scale, but in the grand scheme of things Covid will die down and heart disease come back, since you don't have immunity or vaccines against heart disease. That means that comparing (for the same year) covid vs heart disease is somewhat useless (since covid is an exceptional and short-lived event).

Fixing both problems will probably move deaths to another category (since that is the purpose of having categories), but the argument was that addressing covid has less benefits than addressing heart disease (mostly because covid addresses itself over time, whatever lockdown/mask wearing we do, but heart diseases do not).

There is such a thing as "excess mortality from Covid-19" and it can be measured, and is significant, see: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

So it's NOT like all those half-million people who died from Covid-19 in the US would have died anyway and we would just call their cause of death something else. No. They died because of Covid-19 and many of them because some people publicly downplayed the danger of it and made fun of people wearing masks.

Those were numbers for world rather than just the US. https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-12-09/...

If you consider US only then it's not quite as dramatic but heart disease is still the #1 killer, especially since this happens every year and there's no vaccine for heart disease. 647,000 US deaths due to heart disease in 2019 vs 575,615 deaths due to Covid in 2020/2021. https://www.singlecare.com/blog/news/heart-disease-statistic...

As others have pointed out however, heart disease is a major factor in Covid deaths, for example, a history of heart failure ramps the Covid case-fatality rate from something like 2% for the general population up to 49%, so it's very difficult to fully separate out heart disease vs. covid for those 575k US deaths.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7490208/

If we are serious about following the science, it's pretty clear where we should focus our effort.

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