Comment by totony | Hacker News Reader

Comment by totony | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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