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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Seems like cancer and obesity are already quite well measured and robustly reported, though. Are there numbers to back up your hypothesis that people are dying more due to cancer and heart disease over the past two years?

Or, if you're just proposing that that "will" happen in the future, it seems like it's not really a refutation of the data in the linked article.

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Evidence of all these impacts is easy to find. Here's just one link about the increased rate of childhood obesity:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm

Does the magnitude explain excess deaths though? What this paper is saying is that rate of weight gain among already-obese kids was higher during the pandemic. Does that rate correlate to covid death rates? Seems like a metric for childhood obesity isn't going to get there in any case, since these folks aren't dying at significant rates.

This kind of argument is exhausting. You said that excess deaths are confounded with obesity. I said that if they were, it would be comparatively easy to measure, so I suspect your hypothesis is simply wrong. Then you came back with a number that showed weight gain among kids, which I didn't try to refute.

Your hypothesis is a Big Thing. You're saying people are dying in very large numbers (millions a year), from existing syndroms that we have been tracking for decades. And... somehow epidemiologists are silent on that? It seems suspicious, you agree, right? Isn't the Occam's razor take is that you're simply wrong here, and that people are dying from a pandemic and not obesity?

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