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Comment by rei_ayanami | Hacker News Reader

Or... its being over reported in the west. US counts people who died with covid in the total number, maybe India is a bit more sensible in that regard.

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It is well documented they straight up covered up covid deaths in republican states.

If you make comments like this, why not provide some link as a 'reason to believe'. For all I know you're absolutely spot on but I won't get far quoting "hogrider on HN" as a source, will I? And if your observation thus goes no further, what's the point of it?

This is so easily disproved, just look at total deaths for the period. Where do you think they are coming from?

DUIs are up, suicides are up, overdoses are up, and we keep putting off both routine and urgent medical procedures. There are people with cancer whose procedures are getting bumped because hospitals are full.

There's a meaningful difference between "died from COVID", "died with COVID", and "died due to circumstances surrounding COVID". Our excess deaths are the sum of those 3 categories.

I can tell you for a fact that "died from COVID" is not 100% of those excess deaths, because suicides and overdoses are up. I can't tell you what percentage are in each category, but this "all excess deaths are from COVID" idea is obviously untrue.

The CDC data doesn't even agree with equating excess deaths to COVID deaths. [1] Note that they call out accidents and diabetes deaths increasing 15%.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/podcasts/2022/20220107/20...

Nearly everything you said is incorrect:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234

In 2020, suicides down, cancer deaths down (because covid tends to kill cancer pages much earlier than they would've died, if at all). Some deaths are up, but no where near the numbers to outweigh covid deaths.

You're right on the suicides, I misremembered, my apologies.

I don't know why you're going after a straw-man here. Your own link even shows that COVID isn't anywhere near 100% of the excess deaths, it's ~70% of them. That's my only point. Excess death is not a suitable proxy for COVID deaths, because COVID deaths are only a portion of the excess deaths, sizeable though it may be.

We have excess death, a big portion of those is from COVID, but there are numerous elevated causes of death that also form a substantial portion of those excess deaths. You can't just declare that we have 500k excess deaths, and COVID is around, so COVID killed 500k people.

Interestingly, the sudden, unexplained spike in a bunch of categories for 2020 is very suspect.

Many of them are probably due to the fact that people were less likely to go to the hospital due to fear or hospitals being clogged. Patient care took a big hit, basically.

> suicides and overdoses are up

Do you have reliable statistics on that? Quick ducking showed that suicide rates in the US rose during the 2010's, but it's hard to find more recent numbers. This article claims that suicide rates fell in 2020.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/03/health/suicide-rate-2020-...

See this article. Theres an updated one with even more striking statistics.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/health/drug-overdoses-fen...

You're responding to a question about suicide with a completely different article about opioid deaths, and the article itself attributes those deaths to the still-increasing substitution of fentanyl, which has nothing to do with lockdowns. Yet you're talking about "striking statistics" when suicides did decline.

So... a new 22k deaths by overdose, plus 2.5k new vehicular deaths, minus 1.7k suicides, vs 522k excess deaths. There were a total of 45,855 recorded deaths by suicide. ALL suicides, ALL drug overdoses, and ALL traffic fatalities TOGETHER do not add up to half of the excess deaths. You're spewing complete bullshit.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778361

Somebody else posted the overdoses, I think I stand corrected on the suicides. They're down overall, but up among adolescents and I think my brain extrapolated that out to a general increase. My apologies on the bad data!

I'm slightly suspicious of the claim that they fell, because it flies in the face of common sense and historical trends, but weirder things have happened. It just seems strange that amidst a period where people are self-reporting increases in mental health issues that the suicide rate would drop.

Suicide hotline calls were way up in 2020 [1] (Crisis Text Line was up 40%, SAMHSA hotline was up circa 500%). Major depressive disorder was up 28% in 2020, and anxiety disorders were up 26%. [2]

Perhaps there's a confounding factor here like telehealth increasing the availability of and participation in mental health treatment. Or maybe the abundance of death made people cherish life more.

The cynic in me wonders if the data was massaged to maintain support for lockdowns, but I don't have anything to substantiate that, so it's not a declaration of fact.

1. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/04/8478417...

2. https://www.statnews.com/2021/10/08/mental-health-covid19-pa...

> It just seems strange that amidst a period where people are self-reporting increases in mental health issues that the suicide rate would drop.

Maybe the lockdowns brought people closer together with roommates and family. Long commutes are awful for mental and physical health - widespread WFH cut down on that significantly. Home cooking went slightly up[1] which improves physical and mental health because of healthier eating. People had to do more outdoor recreational activities instead of going to malls and bars, and maybe that made them healthier and less likely to commit suicide.

There are so many confounding factors that it's impossible to tease them apart.

1. https://www.fooddive.com/news/survey-7-in-10-consumers-say-t...

We're way into conjecture territory at this point, so I don't mean any of this as fact.

What confuses me about theories like that is that self-reported mental health issues were up in 2020 [1]. I would have thought if it was increased closeness to roommates/family or home cooking or recreational activities then people would report higher life satisfaction and lower rates of mental health issues.

That CDC report even indicates a 4.4% rate of suicidal ideation, which is higher than normal.

It might be something we never know, but it does make me curious and skeptical. If the data really is correct, there might be advances in mental health treatment hidden here somewhere, which would be great.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm

There's a lag with suicide data. For example, in the UK, the data comes from date of registration not the date of death, and death registrations are delayed because of the huge numbers of people dying by covid.

And then there's probably a lag in deaths too - anyone working in suicide is being very cautious about the early data showing decreases or no rises, because we don't know what's coming.

Fwiw a friend mine had a stage 4 breast cancer diagnosis that went undetected for months because of COVID. They have a 92% chance of dying in the next five years.

My uncle is got final approval for a heart transplant in December. We are currently unsure if there will hospital room if he gets called this week.

COVID is killing people just fine with or without the disease and the unvaccinated by choice need to stop taking up hospitals beds.

If someone dies because they cannot get treatment in a hospital (because it is full of covid patients) do you not consider that death a byproduct of the covid epidemic?

> just look at total deaths for the period. Where do you think they are coming from?

People clearly died. Now, the question is, they died directly from covid, or died from effects of the lockdown?

Looks at the CDC numbers. Accidental deaths are up several fold.

Can't be flu can it, because that's miraculously disappeared!

What's miraculous about flu disappearing? Most Covid countermeasures (masking, distancing) work on flu, we already had a flu vaccine, and flu is far less contagious.

I'd also imagine that if you were susceptible to the flu, you'd also be susceptible to COVID. So some of those who got COVID got that instead of the flu.

If you call all the measures against covid miraculously, sure.

And why would the flu deaths suddenly be up so much compared to earlier years? And how would it do that while we're looking for it and don't find it?

> This is so easily disproved

Oh, you were checking every dying patient?

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