What's the counterfactual? How many of these people would have died this year anyway?

[Guineapigbridge]

As an economist I am finding the statistics on covid-19 frustrating. 227,300 people have died with Covid-19 as of this morning. According to the statistics from New York that are reported on the Worldometer site, 75 percent of those who died will have had pre-existing conditions including Diabetes, Lung Disease, Cancer, Immunodeficiency, Heart Disease, Hypertension, Asthma, Kidney Disease, and GI/Liver Disease. A further 14 percent of them were over 75 years old when they died, even though they didn't have pre-existing conditions. That makes it 89 percent of people who are at quite high risk of death in a given year anyway, right? So has anyone run the numbers on how many would've died anyway? Without a counterfactual a pure count of deaths is meaningless from a policy perspective.

You won't get an accurate answer. I have a serious respiratory condition but I'm unlikely to die for years. I'm a tube, fit and otherwise healthy, and not overweight. Presumably I'd be counted in the "die anyway" category.

Ah, this shit again.

We won't know how bad this has been until it is over.We won't know how many people died too soon until we have an average over then next 5 years.

No thanks Canterbury If that thread has any more posters who think a statement about shaming people is in any wayclever or appropriate I'll give it a miss!

My numbers comment was aimed at you, by the way! You seem to have wilfully misunderstood the remark, and further explanation, you are 'shaming' a poster for! If we cannot discuss numbers, compare and contrast them without being 'shamed', then how can we understand them? That's the real shame here!

The third study in the world that shows a clear relationship with vitamin D deficiency and covid 19 severity has been published. It's a study from Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, New Orleans.
20 patients, randomly sampled.
Conclusions:

''Strikingly, 100% of intensive care patients less than 75 years old had vitamin D deficiency. Among these, 64.6% had critically low (less than 20ng/mL) and three had less than 10 ng/mL.''

Only one of the randomly sampled patients was caucasian - the other 19 were afro american and hispanic.

The study also cites 33 references of causal evidence.

Here is the link.

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.24.20075838v1.full.pdf

A number of the patients were taking vitamin D supplements. So safe sunlight exposure must be more important and the much lower deaths rates in equatorial and southern hemisphere regions are surely explained by this.

SAGE, the group of scientists that advises Public Health England only meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so they will not have seen this study. I doubt whether they have read the previous two conclusive blood studies.

Even if SAGE does read these three studies, they do not have any specialist molecular virologists or immunologists to professionally interpret and evaluate the scientific evidence:

'Government rushes out request for experts to work with Sage panel Notice sent to universities amid concern over lack of expertise in parts of Covid-19 advisory group''

''The government's secret science group has a shocking lack of expertise''

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/27/gaps-sage-scientific-body-scientists-medical

www.theguardian.com/science/2020/apr/29/government-rushes-out-request-for-experts-bolster-sage-panel

In the meantime thousands of elderly are dying in care homes. The government can't even be bothered to test all of them for covid and vit D def. and administer any vitamin D3 supplements. If only they knew.

My invitation wasn't to you Curious, don't worry.

There's a time and place for compassion but we are allowed to question the statistics and make judgements accordingly

You're quite right, but MN was probably the wrong forum to post on.
As you're discovering, querying what folk are actually dying from (as opposed to with), what the collateral damage might be around untreated illnesses, what the economic impact is, or even suggesting there might be other approaches simply isn't welcome

On the second issue I'd offer Prof Karol Sikora's remark that cancer referrals being down 76% could also lead to countless excess deaths, but I doubt this will be welcome either ... because it doesn't fit the overall narrative

querying what folk are actually dying from (as opposed to with), what the collateral damage might be around untreated illnesses, what the economic impact is, or even suggesting there might be other approaches simply isn't welcome

I don't mind discussion of practicalities at all. What frustrates me is that many posters don't seem to understand three fundamental things:

1. That being elderly or having co-morbidities us a very long way from 'would have died anyway'.

1. That the death figures we are talking about are very low compared to what they would be like without lockdown, so when talking about other strategies we need to factor in the extra cases they might cause.

1. That there is a lot of uncertainty so we can't just assume that one particular set of data or expert opinion is right. We have to plan for the reasonable worst case scenario being real.

The thing is the counter-counter-factual (ha!) is how many survivors you have with significant organ damage who don't die but will now die early.

My husband had something called congestive heart failure. It wasn't actively killing him (caused massive edema in his legs) but once you have it your chances of a heart attack in the next year go up massively.

There will be people who "survive" this and are counted in the recovered figures who will die within the next two years because their organs can't keep going.

I found this article really interesting about excess deaths around the world:

www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/16/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries

Interesting info on the %accuracy of the initial, incorrected data in each country.

That'll take a while longer to digest all of it....

There is still a (theoretical) possibility that the deaths this year were simply accelerated by the covid (which could mean that there will be a lower than average mortality for some time now, after a period of excess mortality). This phenomenon would not unusual, a somewhat similar pattern often happens in heavy flu years (when the vaccine is a bad guess).
But the rest of the data does not suggest that this is very likely. And in any case there is no sufficient data yet to prove or disprove anything statistically.

@frumpety - no we don't know for sure. But it's worth talking about as lots of experts (including Neil Ferguson) think that's the case.

@donquixotedelamancha and @TheCanterburyWhales - you both seem very angry at anyone wanting to look at this topic. Why? These are legitimate questions. No one is trivialising the deaths when they use word like "only." They mean "only" by way of comparison to what could otherwise be the case. The locking down of most of the Western world needs to weighed up against the deadliness of this disease. Yes, people will sadly die. 600,000 people die every year in the UK. Lots of these would be preventable if humans stopped doing certain activities. If the news was looking at these death figures every day and saying X amount of people died in car accidents today and X amount of people died in fires, would you be demanding no one questioned those wanting to ban cars and electrics. Would someone be cold hearted if they said, yes these are awful but we have to still drive and use electricity? We need to know the stats to weigh up the trade off and shutting anyone down who wants to discuss this seems a neurotic reaction.

you both seem very angry at anyone wanting to look at this topic. Why? These are legitimate questions.

I appreciate tone is hard to read in text but I really think you haven't read my posts carefully. You are presumably mistaking sarcasm for anger.

Counterpoint is the lives saved by reduced pollution

I saw an estimate today that it was already in the region of 1700

The point being made is that it seems unlikely an economist would have such a poor grasp of the data which is readily available.

Ah, thanks for this, I'm an economist who also has three young children at home who is holding down a high-stress consultancy job from my kitchen table. The excess-deaths data isn't widely or consistently reported (as can be evidenced from the useful debate on this thread). How are you going? Have you been perfect lately? Why you gotta be so mean?

The data thread is useful thank you to the person who suggested it.

Analysis and projections done on the ONS data, allowing for lag in reporting, etc, suggests that the true number of excess UK deaths since first Corona death is now around 46,000. Chilling figures.

^ this, and the government will never admit it. The people who have died of Covid without being tested are being airbrushed out.

David Spiegelhalter has written some good stuff on this and I highly recommend his podcast- Risky Talk

David Spiegelhalter has written some good stuff on this

Funnily enough that's who Grant Schapps was quoting when he shouted down Paul Nurse of all people, on question time tonight.

Whose death is being airbrushed out?

The ONS data is there, public and freely available. The excess mortality rates are discussed by Chris Whitty etc all every day. They repeat the obvious: the true rate of excess mortality and the underlying causes are complex and won't be fully analysed and understood for a long while yet... in every country.

So much data has been collected by the ONS, as it always has done. To say some death rates are being hidden is entirely incorrect.

Ultimately I know that’s true - but on their platform at Downing Street yesterday Dominic Raab said that 26,000 people had died and that that included community and care home deaths. However these are only people who were tested, and the real number of fatalities so far is far higher.

So yes the real figure will come out eventually, but people watch the conferences and the press quote from them. When the government and mainstream press tell us that 26,000 have so far died, this is completely not the case. They don’t qualify their figure either.

Try to remember that they also state that those numbers are for those tested, that they are trying to show the pattern of infection and death, not necessarily the absolute rate.

The two are separate issues and, whilst the government and science board tell us that once a day we get bombarded with obfuscation, headline grabbing and scared posts at a much higher rate each and every minute.

Sorry, that sounds really patronising, but I've been trying to explain some of that to a neighbour who is totally freaked out by some of what she has read. She is too scared to be able to take a small step back and process all she has read. Every Facebook post, every news headline, every anything just scares her more.

She's a very intelligent woman, she has just reached her limit.

Many in your list do not lead to a probable death in same year. Or years even.

Try to remember that they also state that those numbers are for those tested, that they are trying to show the pattern of infection and death, not necessarily the absolute rate.

They can’t show the real pattern of infection and death by their own metric as there hasn’t been enough testing. GPs, paramedics, funeral directors and priests - for example - as well as the ONS, know the full story. It is distressing that the government cannot be more transparent.

Added to which, the part about testing is in the small print. I have never heard them say that their figure is not necessarily the absolute rate and the unqualified figure of 26,000 (the real number is far higher) was all over the news yesterday so their spin works.

I understand why the government is doing it - they will be held to account, and the real figures are more shocking than theirs already are. However being transparent now will lead to more trust in them - trust which has been severely eroded IMO.

I am not scared to go out - though I follow the rules - nor am I reacting to obfuscation - other than government obfuscation.