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Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

There is no conclusion that all of those deaths were due to COVID, and the article is irresponsible for implying as much even after repeatedly saying that attributing all the excess deaths to COVID is jumping to conclusions.

Some other things that have happened since before COVID which would cause an increase in pre-COVID forecasts include a war between the world's two global superpowers, a global recession and disruption of the supply chain, a massive shortage of healthcare workers in many countries, and an enormous spike in usage of fentanyl in the developed world.

COVID plus any or all of those factors are contributing to excess deaths.

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The direct losses between the war and fentanyl won't account for much.

100k of those are drug overdoses in the US (the place with by far the highest rate of fentanyl use). There is a similar number of killed in the first year of the Ukraine war. The economist is pointing out the estimates are off by 3M lives, so those two directly account for less than 10%.

Your points of a global recession, disruption of the supply chain and shortage of healthcare workers could quite easily be attributed to covid because excess deaths during the initial outbreak contributed to massive burnout and a loss of workforce.

As much as hospital administrators love to blame COVID for underpaying and overworking healthcare professionals, a person dying because they got a late cancer diagnosis because they couldn't see a family doctor for 6 months because of a shortage caused by burnout is too far removed to attribute to COVID in good faith.

From everything we know the opposite is true in that deaths directly due to COVID are undercounted, not overcounted. Multiple states in the US were directly seen undercooking the numbers so that it looked better. See here [1]

Also even in the scenario you post as a semi-gotcha moment wouldn't be counted as COVID-related, but I would hope it would be obvious to you that certain fast growing cancers have significantly better prognosis if caught early.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236613

Yup. Anyone in power has an incentive to say “we’ve got this under control, trust us everything’s fine.”

This is true at every level. From downplaying mistakes in nursing homes in NY, to fudging numbers in FL, to Trump wishing we’d stop testing, to Biden proclaiming victory upon the vaccine rollout, it’s all the same incentive.

I don't see it as being far removed.

And it wasn't just medium-long term issues like cancer diagnosis that was impacted but very time sensitive medical emergencies also, like heart attacks. The pandemic increased ambulance response times, time to emergency room beds, stretching of healthcare resources over emergency departments, even things like the added PPE requirements slowed everything down.

Why?

> a war between the world's two global superpowers

Yeah I don't think Russia qualifies as a superpower anymore...

Pretty sure Ukraine isn't either.

Ukraine is definitely not a world superpower, no.

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