Comment by jimmydorry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimmydorry | Hacker News Reader

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>And 2) 2020 and 2021 have very large Covid-surge-shaped excess death bumps that imply an incredibly strong correlation between Covid and the deviation in deaths from “normal” years.

It would be more accurate to say "COVID-19 impacted years" than "incredibly strong correlation between Covid".

A lot of government and public policy changes were quickly made during these times. Are you willing to say with complete certainty that the lockdowns and associated increase in poor mental health had no impact?

We also had global supply chain crunches which affected food and medication availability (among other things). Are you willing to say that having certain brands of prevention / life saving drugs completely unavailable (forcing people to consult doctors for substitutes or go without) had no impact?

I think you’ll see that I very explicitly said I am not willing to definitively say those things, but that I am highly skeptical that those types of effects would be so responsive to the changes in number of Covid cases.

Does it in any way make sense to you that Covid cases falling by X% in a given week would directly cause an immediate corresponding drop in depression, drug overdose, or prescription drug supply chain issues? That would be absolutely incredible to me. It did however cause an immediate corresponding decline in excess deaths, regardless of assigning any cause. That tells me something.

> It did however cause an immediate corresponding decline in excess deaths, regardless of assigning any cause.

Did it, though? We see deaths increase in August/September during the Delta wave, but we don’t see them decline when Covid cases fell drastically earlier in the summer: https://imgur.com/a/b4Pobrh

That suggests 25-44 year olds may be experiencing an elevated death rate that persists even when Covid cases were low.

I’ll need to rerun my graphs. I haven’t done them since mid summer but at the time if you overlaid the Covid rise and fall on the excess deaths rise and fall it was uncanny how well they matched. The falling side of delta may have been different.

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