Many excess deaths attributed to natural causes are uncounted Covid-19 deaths | Hacker News Reader

Many excess deaths attributed to natural causes are uncounted Covid-19 deaths

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10 pointsbelltaco10 comments

As an anecdote, my grandmother was in a nursing home that went on lockdown. She was stuck in her room all day. Developed a blood clot in her leg from sitting constantly and that killed her. Pretty hard to attribute that to COVID but… I kind of do?

I would also say the opposite is ALSO true. Many deaths attributed to covid were likely not.

But since this is considering 'excess' deaths, wouldn't any there need to be an explanation for the temporal increase vs baseline for any non-COVID causes that would explain the excess?

Yes but there are a million causes of death other than Covid.

Indeed, but they don't always peak over the same period. Any alternative theory has to provide a plausible explanation for why all these other causes of death (which presumably were also causes pre-COVID) all of a sudden decided to spike/ramp up and periodically surge again (against the pre-COVID baseline).

Not being allowed to see a doctor to manage chronic health issues.

Not being allowed to go to the gym.

Not being allowed to go outside.

Not being allowed to see family.

Not being allowed to see family when they're dying.

Being cooped up inside with your immediate family when you usually have some amount of time apart.

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Every animal ever studied fails to thrive when placed in captivity. The human subject experiments from 2020-2021 were unconscionable.

Your first point would be a contributor to a surge coincident with lockdowns, although even for that cohort some/many of those would not have occurred straight away but may have occurred outside that time window (though accelerated).

None of your other points, regrettable, discomforting and painful though they were, could have caused that surge in excess deaths.

I get that you hated the lockdowns. I’d argue most people did, but that doesn’t preclude the fact that many of the people that hated them also accepted their ‘necessity’. I put that in quotes because the necessity itself may be arguable, but the fact that many people were convinced they were necessary is not.

Well. All animal studies on captivity show negative health effects. All human studies show that stress has negative health effects, and that exercise and time spent outdoors have positive health effects. To the extent that being sedentary and stressed contributed to obesity and/or high blood pressure, there is certainly a plausible causal mechanism worth further study. Additionally, there is evidence of increases in reckless driving — see https://insurancenewsnet.com/innarticle/new-data-reveal-reck... — and domestic violence — see https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/06/shadow-pandem... .

Whether they were the right policy call or not, it's clear that drastic environment changes had drastic behavioral effects, and that the behavioral effects either provably did have, or, based on all available scientific data, probably could have had a regrettable impact on excess deaths.

As societies across the globe engage in introspection on COVID response, it's worth further research and factoring the results into their conclusions.

Perhaps I didn't explain myself. What you describe re: sedentary and stressed etc, would definitely be expected to lead to an increase in deaths, however those deaths would not occur _at the time_. Many (most?) of the deaths from those types of causes would typically follow some time (possibly years) later. The cohort who would already been prone to cardiac type diseases would (I expect) mostly be sedentary or tending that way anyway, so the increase as a result of lockdowns would have been a smaller delta for them, than say for a very fit cohort (where any cardiac effects would be seen later; my guess). So while not denying this cause of excess deaths, I can't see it being the driver for a 'fast follow' surge of deaths following lockdowns. It would be (to my mind), more akin to exposure to carcinogens or radiation, where there would be a gentle rise and long-tail of excess deaths rather than most of them being in a spike/surge.

If anything, what this would imply is that we haven't seen yet the completion of excess deaths related to this era. But proving it will become increasingly more difficult as the long-tail blends into the noise.

The economist has been tracking this for a while: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

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