> "The CDC weekly death counts, which reflect the information on death certificates and so have a lag of up to eight weeks or longer, show that for the week ending Nov. 6, there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319."
So last year more covid deaths (particularly among the elderly), but while those numbers have declined, the numbers from younger "working age" people have increased more than enough to make up for it.
> "Just 8.9% of ICU beds are available at hospitals in the state, a low for the year, and lower than at any time during the pandemic. But the majority of ICU beds are not taken up by COVID-19 patients – just 37% are, while 54% of the ICU beds are being occupied by people with other illnesses or conditions."
Well a lot of people were avoiding medical care (precisely because of Covid concerns), so this makes some sense. Couple that with the increased death rate for younger people and something has happened to worsen the health and outcomes generally for that population. Cue wild speculation and theories.
Within my brothers circle of friends / former friends etc, amongst those that participate in recreational drug use, there have been a crazy number of Fentanyl related deaths. They're all between the ages of 25 - 30. I can't help but wonder how much this has an impact.
It's strange that this article doesn't actually mention the number of deaths for each year. They only mention the 40% increase for the younger demographic and the source says "the increase in deaths represents huge, huge numbers".
Let's assume deaths for older people haven't changed so the increase is entirely among the younger group.
x: younger
y: older
1.4x + y = 1350
x + y = 1319
0.4x = 31
x = 77.5 (younger 2020)
1.4x = 108.5 (younger 2021)
y = 1241.5 (older 2020 and 20201)
So assuming no increase in non-COVID deaths in the older group, we have 77.5 deaths in 2020 and 108.5 deaths in 2021 in the younger demographic. The actual numbers would be even lower since there have obviously been deaths in the older population.
Unless I am embarrassingly wrong on the calculation, these figures don't make sense. The source says this 40% increase figure is based on his life insurance customers who are “primarily working-age people 18 to 64”. This being just among his policy holders could explain the tiny absolute figures in the younger group. But where are the numbers for the older group coming from? His statement doesn't exclude the possibility of policies for ages < 18 and > 64. But if that's a small fraction of their customer base, it would imply a huge death rate for the older policy holders.
These numbers seem very fishy. Even if his older members are dying at astronomical rates and his numbers are correct, this is about as far from a representative sample as you could get and cannot be extrapolated to the general population. And I assume that's what the source means when he says "the increase in deaths represents huge, huge numbers."
By the way, I am not implying that there hasn't been an increase in non-COVID deaths among the young and old in these last two years. We know that's the because there is actually real data on this that the article could have included.
Changes in death rates directly relate to relative vaccination rates. Vaccination was initially rolled out to the elderly they where also more willing to get vaccinated. It’s strange to think that 75 year olds grew up in a time period where several horrific diseases disappeared due to vaccination efforts. It it’s clear they have a lot more faith in vaccination.
There is uncertainty in many areas of life, but this seems like one thing we don’t have to speculate about. We will not only have definitive data [1] within a couple years, but also annual [2] and weekly [3] provisional data much sooner.
Without knowing anything else, I seriously doubt that is statistically significant.
The normal pre-COVID ICU bed occupancy rate was somewhere near 57-82% (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840149/). 54% is quite low. I suspect that the bar for getting into an ICU bed has been raised by the number of COVID patients.
Well a lot of people were avoiding medical care (precisely because of Covid concerns), so this makes some sense. Couple that with the increased death rate for younger people and something has happened to worsen the health and outcomes generally for that population. Cue wild speculation and theories.
Not sure how your first two sentences above aren't speculation. It's like you're preemptively attack all the other speculation as "wild".
Many people kept insisting "Not many young people are dying from Covid-19" a statement that over looked the fact that, under normal circumstances, not many young people die at all. But there was an article in the New York Times that offered these facts about people aged 20 to 40.
July, 2019: 11,000 dead
July, 2020: 16,000 dead
Both numbers are small in a country where 3 million people die each year, about 250,000 a month. But it's still a 45% increase, so that age group was the worst affected, in terms of the increase in death. The increase in the death rate of old people was not as dramatic, as older people make up the vast majority of all deaths, every year.
If you look at expected years of life lost - and the average person is ~30 - you could multiply the numbers by ~47.
~47 x 5,000 = 235k years of life (extra).
In the US in 2020 the average age of death from Covid was ~77 [1]. People ~77 are expected to life ~10.2 years [2]. In 2020, there were ~350k Covid deaths [3]. But (very crudely) 3.5M years of life lost.
This small group of 11,000 people (3%) made up 7% of years of life lost.
By 2021, the average age of Covid death was ~67 - so the average person was losing ~17 years of life [1]. This is because that extra ~5,000 deaths has so much weight.
> But it's still a 45% increase, so that age group was the worst affected, in terms of the increase in death.
You can't draw that conclusion at all with, effectively, one data point while assuming the other is a baseline. You need to develop a proper statistical profile, determine the mean, variance/standard deviation, standard error and then try to understand the numbers to make inferences.
Worth noting that while there is a clear and measurable increase, the CDC makes a nonetheless significant error by assuming 2019 is the baseline when in fact we see a baseline increase every year even without other factors (both because of increasing population and because of slowing advances in medically extending lifespans).
2. might be wrong since the age group is manipulative but you haven't corrected enough. This data is a bit harder to get though and may not be available to the US. But data from other countries suggest that a vast majority of cases is in the 60-64 bracket. Sadly many governments choose these questionable grouping and it is fairly misleading.
> 600,000 more elderly Americans, or 1 of 100, have died during the Covid epidemic than would have died had the epidemic not occurred.
The article does not say this. The substantial majority of Covid deaths occur among people close to or beyond the typical life expectancy [1]. It's hard to measure how many people would have died during this time frame due to complications other than Covid, and the NYT article you linked to did not claim that these are additional deaths beyond what "would have died had the epidemic not occurred."
“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.”
This sounds very strange indeed, I'd like to see the numbers. For instance Euromomo https://www.euromomo.eu collects the statistics about death rates, here is a plot for the Italian death rate and you can see the mortality spikes with the covid waves, but those are quite specific for the elderly https://imgur.com/a/8cUdNcb
It sounds very strange that the death spike is "over" 3 sigma, which should mean over 3 standard deviations, which is really unbelievable, to me this looks like an artefact of some sort
My hypothesis is that this is caused from diabetes. I first learned about this when my friend was diagnosed with diabetes at the beginning of the pandemic. He said that Stanford was investigating a potential connection. Now there is a bit more literature [1]. If you go to [2] and select "Weekly Number of Deaths by Cause Subgroup" and then "Other select causes" from the dropdown, you will see that diabetes jumped up at the start of the pandemic and has stayed at ~40% increased levels since.
I'm actually surprised it is not higher. For 40-64 year old in the US, the annual chance of death is about half a percent (before covid) so a 40% increase is still a very low mortality rate.
Define "very low". I think the "half a percent" number can seem "artificially" low because it's just looking at the probability of death in a single year. Looking at US actuarial tables, even an 80 year old has an annual chance of death of less than 5%. Just looking at that number alone may make one think that is a "low" death rate, but nobody is surprised when an 80 year-old dies.
I’m surprised it is as high as you claim! You’re saying that for that age group, in a given year, the chances are 1 in 200 of dying? That seems like pretty bad odds on something that is literally life and death.
Mortality rates are basically up in all countries (at least those who can adequately measure it). My bet is that "after Covid" we will see rates under the pre-pandemic value for a couple of years as Covid was most lethal to those that would have died the next 0-5 years anyways without it.
I run the same trail for over 10 years. In the last year, I had to call 911 for a guy with chest pains and twice for suicidal women waiting on the train tracks for the train. Never happened before.
I'm a little scared we may be entering a period of mass psychosis which is more deadly than any virus.
The psychological conditions that lead people to burn witches and the rise of dictatorships are here.
If I was richer I would probably be buying a home on some tiny island in the Caribbean.
With few exceptions, if you want to know what's really going on, the insurance companies are the numbers to draw from. They have a vested interest in knowing what's happening and people usually have a vested interest in reporting to them to collect resources.
(The exception is when there are secondary effects. Auto insurance reporting under samples minor accidents, because people don't want to risk their perfect driving record rate bonuses on a fender-bender. But there are no incentives to refrain from collecting on life insurance.)
Note that life insurance isn't going to be a good model--there are two selection biases at work here.
1) Those in ill health likely can't afford life insurance.
2) Life insurance is mostly to provide for dependents--which means people in good enough shape to have dependents and people are young enough to still have dependents. (Once the kids are grown there's much less reason for term life insurance.)
My uncle was outside that age group but died last summer of a heart attack —- due to Covid. All the ICU beds in his area were occupied by Covid patients.
I’m so sorry. My father-in-law has had his “elective” surgery to deal with a hernia cancelled twice due to hospital overcapacity, and all we can do is pray that Germany’s current restrictions will have kept the numbers low enough for his current appointment this week and likely follow up procedure to deal with tachycardia to happen.
They’re not even talking about rescheduling the hernia surgery anytime soon - he’s making do with a compression band.
This is why it is other people’s business whether someone is vaccinated.
This is a massive story and hugely under-reported.
Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths, Davison said.
“What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.”
18-64 is an extremely broad range. Does anyone have a breakdown of smaller ranges? I'd like to know what is accounting for the deaths of younger people, since supposedly, statistically covid has a very mild effect on their health.
He says it's going to cost the company more but could there also be an increased incentive for covered employees to increase their coverage and thus increase the premium revenue to OneAmerica? I am generally dubious when the CEO of a (private) company that's bottom line is so closely tied to death rates publishes an article with such a nice round number increase in the death rate.
Excess mortality seems to be way higher in the US than it is in the Europe, even though reported Covid deaths are in the same ballpark. In Europe, Covid deaths and excess mortality seem to match, more or less. In the US, excess mortality is several times higher.
Pretty likely this is associated with the huge increase in mental illness associated with isolation during the pandemic. The depression rate tripled from pre-pandemic levels, leading to a 20% increase in suicide rates. Obviously drug use and all the associated risks would increase due to that, but there are also a few studies showing a strong correlation between mental health and life expectancy, even after accounting for drug use.
[+] [-] anttisalmela|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewclunn|4 years ago|reply
So last year more covid deaths (particularly among the elderly), but while those numbers have declined, the numbers from younger "working age" people have increased more than enough to make up for it.
> "Just 8.9% of ICU beds are available at hospitals in the state, a low for the year, and lower than at any time during the pandemic. But the majority of ICU beds are not taken up by COVID-19 patients – just 37% are, while 54% of the ICU beds are being occupied by people with other illnesses or conditions."
Well a lot of people were avoiding medical care (precisely because of Covid concerns), so this makes some sense. Couple that with the increased death rate for younger people and something has happened to worsen the health and outcomes generally for that population. Cue wild speculation and theories.
[+] [-] ganoushoreilly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cik2e|4 years ago|reply
Let's assume deaths for older people haven't changed so the increase is entirely among the younger group.
x: younger y: older
1.4x + y = 1350 x + y = 1319 0.4x = 31 x = 77.5 (younger 2020) 1.4x = 108.5 (younger 2021) y = 1241.5 (older 2020 and 20201)
So assuming no increase in non-COVID deaths in the older group, we have 77.5 deaths in 2020 and 108.5 deaths in 2021 in the younger demographic. The actual numbers would be even lower since there have obviously been deaths in the older population.
Unless I am embarrassingly wrong on the calculation, these figures don't make sense. The source says this 40% increase figure is based on his life insurance customers who are “primarily working-age people 18 to 64”. This being just among his policy holders could explain the tiny absolute figures in the younger group. But where are the numbers for the older group coming from? His statement doesn't exclude the possibility of policies for ages < 18 and > 64. But if that's a small fraction of their customer base, it would imply a huge death rate for the older policy holders.
These numbers seem very fishy. Even if his older members are dying at astronomical rates and his numbers are correct, this is about as far from a representative sample as you could get and cannot be extrapolated to the general population. And I assume that's what the source means when he says "the increase in deaths represents huge, huge numbers."
By the way, I am not implying that there hasn't been an increase in non-COVID deaths among the young and old in these last two years. We know that's the because there is actually real data on this that the article could have included.
[+] [-] redisman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|4 years ago|reply
Changes in death rates directly relate to relative vaccination rates. Vaccination was initially rolled out to the elderly they where also more willing to get vaccinated. It’s strange to think that 75 year olds grew up in a time period where several horrific diseases disappeared due to vaccination efforts. It it’s clear they have a lot more faith in vaccination.
https://data.cdc.gov/Vaccinations/COVID-19-Vaccination-and-C...
[+] [-] divbzero|4 years ago|reply
There is uncertainty in many areas of life, but this seems like one thing we don’t have to speculate about. We will not only have definitive data [1] within a couple years, but also annual [2] and weekly [3] provisional data much sooner.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm
[3]: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Provisional-Counts-of-Death...
[+] [-] mcguire|4 years ago|reply
Without knowing anything else, I seriously doubt that is statistically significant.
The normal pre-COVID ICU bed occupancy rate was somewhere near 57-82% (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840149/). 54% is quite low. I suspect that the bar for getting into an ICU bed has been raised by the number of COVID patients.
BTW, Indiana has ~1,940 ICU beds (https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/indiana-releases-specific...). In numbers, that means
* ~173 are unoccupied,
* ~718 are occupied by COVID patients, and
* ~1048 are occupied by non-COVID patients.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|4 years ago|reply
Not sure how your first two sentences above aren't speculation. It's like you're preemptively attack all the other speculation as "wild".
[+] [-] fuckyah|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lkrubner|4 years ago|reply
July, 2019: 11,000 dead
July, 2020: 16,000 dead
Both numbers are small in a country where 3 million people die each year, about 250,000 a month. But it's still a 45% increase, so that age group was the worst affected, in terms of the increase in death. The increase in the death rate of old people was not as dramatic, as older people make up the vast majority of all deaths, every year.
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|4 years ago|reply
~47 x 5,000 = 235k years of life (extra).
In the US in 2020 the average age of death from Covid was ~77 [1]. People ~77 are expected to life ~10.2 years [2]. In 2020, there were ~350k Covid deaths [3]. But (very crudely) 3.5M years of life lost.
This small group of 11,000 people (3%) made up 7% of years of life lost.
By 2021, the average age of Covid death was ~67 - so the average person was losing ~17 years of life [1]. This is because that extra ~5,000 deaths has so much weight.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wvpublic.org/health-science...
[2] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm
[+] [-] keneda7|4 years ago|reply
I am confused why you are completely ignoring this statement and trying to claim the exact opposite.
[+] [-] robomartin|4 years ago|reply
> July, 2020: 16,000 dead
> But it's still a 45% increase, so that age group was the worst affected, in terms of the increase in death.
You can't draw that conclusion at all with, effectively, one data point while assuming the other is a baseline. You need to develop a proper statistical profile, determine the mean, variance/standard deviation, standard error and then try to understand the numbers to make inferences.
[+] [-] freyr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disambiguation|4 years ago|reply
Where are you getting those numbers?
2019 - ages 25 - 44:
- represent ~320 deaths per 100k. [0]
- represent 85M pop. [1]
=> That's ~272k deaths per year in that age band.
You can check my math.
[0] (page 3) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db395-H.pdf
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the...
Further, this chart shows covid deaths as a proportion of all cause mortality. [2]
For ages under 50, covid accounts for 1-5% of all deaths.
For ages over 50, covid accounts for 10-15% of all deaths.
[2] (caveat, this is a snapshot of Feb 17 2021 data) https://datavisualizations.heritage.org/public-health/covid-...
In no age band do we see a 45% increase in deaths due to covid.
[+] [-] spenrose|4 years ago|reply
1. 600,000 more elderly Americans, or 1 of 100, have died during the Covid epidemic than would have died had the epidemic not occurred.
2. 200,000 more non-elderly Americans, or 1 of 1,400, have died—but that's mostly ages 15-64, so more like 1 in 1,000 adults of working age.
3. The CDC says adult death rates were up 20%. [2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/us/covid-deaths-elderly-a...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db427.htm#secti...
[+] [-] jtc331|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raxxorrax|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Manuel_D|4 years ago|reply
The article does not say this. The substantial majority of Covid deaths occur among people close to or beyond the typical life expectancy [1]. It's hard to measure how many people would have died during this time frame due to complications other than Covid, and the NYT article you linked to did not claim that these are additional deaths beyond what "would have died had the epidemic not occurred."
1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
[+] [-] TRossi|4 years ago|reply
This sounds very strange indeed, I'd like to see the numbers. For instance Euromomo https://www.euromomo.eu collects the statistics about death rates, here is a plot for the Italian death rate and you can see the mortality spikes with the covid waves, but those are quite specific for the elderly https://imgur.com/a/8cUdNcb
It sounds very strange that the death spike is "over" 3 sigma, which should mean over 3 standard deviations, which is really unbelievable, to me this looks like an artefact of some sort
[+] [-] hervature|4 years ago|reply
[1] - https://www.nih.gov/how-covid-19-can-lead-diabetes
[2] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
[+] [-] k2enemy|4 years ago|reply
https://hdpulse.nimhd.nih.gov/data/deathrates/index.php?stat...
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jb1991|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cma|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] toss1|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throwaway4good|4 years ago|reply
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/life-expectancy-in-u-s-decl...
This is for 2020 - COVID-19 deaths are more for 2021.
Really wild numbers if you think about it.
[+] [-] littlecranky67|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dukeofdoom|4 years ago|reply
I'm a little scared we may be entering a period of mass psychosis which is more deadly than any virus. The psychological conditions that lead people to burn witches and the rise of dictatorships are here.
If I was richer I would probably be buying a home on some tiny island in the Caribbean.
Great video on mass psychosis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09maaUaRT4M
[+] [-] fundad|4 years ago|reply
I see it also in the school vandalism, increase in shooting deaths and general uncertainty about rule of law
[+] [-] mellavora|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|4 years ago|reply
(The exception is when there are secondary effects. Auto insurance reporting under samples minor accidents, because people don't want to risk their perfect driving record rate bonuses on a fender-bender. But there are no incentives to refrain from collecting on life insurance.)
[+] [-] LorenPechtel|4 years ago|reply
1) Those in ill health likely can't afford life insurance.
2) Life insurance is mostly to provide for dependents--which means people in good enough shape to have dependents and people are young enough to still have dependents. (Once the kids are grown there's much less reason for term life insurance.)
[+] [-] erdewit|4 years ago|reply
https://www.rivm.nl/monitoring-sterftecijfers-nederland
[+] [-] gumby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MandieD|4 years ago|reply
They’re not even talking about rescheduling the hernia surgery anytime soon - he’s making do with a compression band.
This is why it is other people’s business whether someone is vaccinated.
[+] [-] zaroth|4 years ago|reply
Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths, Davison said.
“What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.”
[+] [-] daenz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] setToNull|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyleblarson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agmsr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austinkhale|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatever1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steelstraw|4 years ago|reply
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fentanyl-overdose-death/
[+] [-] lazyjones|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|4 years ago|reply
US: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm (age related https://public.tableau.com/views/COVID_excess_mort_withcause... )
Europe: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
Excess mortality seems to be way higher in the US than it is in the Europe, even though reported Covid deaths are in the same ballpark. In Europe, Covid deaths and excess mortality seem to match, more or less. In the US, excess mortality is several times higher.
[+] [-] falconroar|4 years ago|reply
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/10/depression-increased-during-...