WaPo: The Tragedy of Avoidable Covid Deaths

[Colonoscopy]

Study looked at all-cause mortality and then what would've been expected vs what happened during the covid pandemic.

Two things:
A) The US sucked.
B) Start fighting over Sweden's results.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-tragedy-of-avoidable-covid-deaths/2022/12/03/9892a028-7313-11ed-867c-8ec695e4afcd_story.html

 

[binsfeldcyhawk2]

Study looked at all-cause mortality and then what would've been expected vs what happened during the covid pandemic.

Two things:
A) The US sucked.
B) Start fighting over Sweden's results.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-tragedy-of-avoidable-covid-deaths/2022/12/03/9892a028-7313-11ed-867c-8ec695e4afcd_story.html

US sucked because our population is disproportionately fat and unhealthy

 

[Colonoscopy]

US sucked because our population is disproportionately fat and unhealthy

Yeah, I'm not sure they factored that into the study.

 

[Crimea River]

I thought everyone in Sweden died since they took such a backwards approach.

 

[Menace Sockeyes]

US sucked because our population is disproportionately fat and unhealthy

I’m sure blowing up the federal pandemic response team out of spite and having a POTUS who scoffed at it ever killing 30-40k didn’t help.

 

[Rifler]

US sucked because our population is disproportionately fat and unhealthy

Plus we do not have a homogeneous culture that blindly accepts direction from authority...

 

[binsfeldcyhawk2]

I’m sure blowing up the federal pandemic response team out of spite and having a POTUS who scoffed at it ever killing 30-40k didn’t help.

I’m sure it didn’t.

I think a country of fatties was going to fair poorly regardless….

Obesity, Race/Ethnicity, and COVID-19

Having obesity increases risk of severe illness from COVID-19.

www.cdc.gov

World Rankings: Obesity Rates by Country 2022

Rankings of Obesity Rates by Country. Obesity Population Report. List of the Most Obese Countries in the World (Report: October 2022).

renewbariatrics.com

 

[Colonoscopy]

I’m sure it didn’t.

I think a country of fatties was going to fair poorly regardless….

Obesity, Race/Ethnicity, and COVID-19

Having obesity increases risk of severe illness from COVID-19.

www.cdc.gov

World Rankings: Obesity Rates by Country 2022

Rankings of Obesity Rates by Country. Obesity Population Report. List of the Most Obese Countries in the World (Report: October 2022).

renewbariatrics.com

Although, from the article:

(Whether you’re comparing counties, states or countries, excess deaths shouldn’t depend on factors such as population age or overall health because the statistic compares the actual number of deaths in each region with the typical number of deaths in that same region, said Yale cardiologist Harlan Krumholz, co-author of the preprint.)

 

[binsfeldcyhawk2]

Although, from the article:

(Whether you’re comparing counties, states or countries, excess deaths shouldn’t depend on factors such as population age or overall health because the statistic compares the actual number of deaths in each region with the typical number of deaths in that same region, said Yale cardiologist Harlan Krumholz, co-author of the preprint.)

That doesn’t make much sense….we have more obese people..and obese people have worse outcomes with Covid…hence increasing Covid deaths

 

[Colonoscopy]

That doesn’t make much sense….we have more obese people..and obese people have worse outcomes with Covid…hence increasing Covid deaths

I think the argument is that excess death, naturally, accounts for health.

Unhealthy would be more likely to die anyway. So prior to covid, X unhealthy group would've been producing more deaths relative to Y health(ier) group anyway. So it's already figured in.

That said... I'm not sure the logic completely works. An obese 45 year old with really high blood pressure will likely last a few more decades, even in poor(er) health and with somewhat of a higher death rate than someone from the healthy group.

The problem might be something like: while they're only 20% more likely to die in the next decade than someone from the healthy group, they're 40% more likely to die from Covid than someone from the healthy group. (due to before mentioned health conditions)

 

[Colonoscopy]

Lends support to the idea that we should've been focusing moreso on the needs of younger folk...

And in a surprising twist, while many more elderly people died by sheer numbers, the rate of excess death was higher among people under 50. That is, the death rate among those under 50 was more abnormal than the deaths of those over 65.

 

[Colonoscopy]

Plus we do not have a homogeneous culture that blindly accepts direction from authority...

You can be skeptical without making terrible decisions. Unfortunately I think politics and media in the US, being as they are, helped to produce a bunch of very poor decision makers.

From the article:

Comparing countries can be even more revealing. Another study, published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed much more excess mortality in the US than was seen in a number of other wealthy countries during the delta and omicron waves.

That study tracked the period after June 2021, when vaccines were widely available in these countries. The US had the most excess deaths, at 145.5 excess deaths per 100,000 people. The next-worst country was Finland with 82.2. The best two were Sweden, with 32.4, and New Zealand, with only 5.1 excess deaths per 100,000. The 10 most-vaccinated US states appeared comparable to much of Europe at 65.1, while the least-vaccinated states had an excess death rate of 193.3. Numbers like these should help puncture the myth, persistent in some communities, that the vaccines themselves caused a significant number of deaths — that’s simply not true.

 

[pablow]

The USA rates near the top in fatties and old people. I'd like to see the stats after adjusting all counties for age and obesity. That would be a truer measure of the effectiveness of various mitigation strategies.

 

[Colonoscopy]

The USA rates near the top in fatties and old people. I'd like to see the stats after adjusting all counties for age and obesity. That would be a truer measure of the effectiveness of various mitigation strategies.

So New Zealand was tops in lowest excess mortality during covid.

They're also one of the most obese countries in the world. I do wonder how many people actually had covid there before getting a vaccine, however.

Obesity Update - OECD

Data and research on health including biotechnology, cancer, health care, health spending, health insurance, fitness, dementia, disability, obesity, smoking, genetics and mortality., Today, more than one in two adults and nearly one in six children are overweight or obese in the OECD area. The...

www.oecd.org

 

[Hawk_82]

There are a lot of assumptions made in this article.

I copied a portion of the discussion from the article related to the 1918 flu pandemic. I posted this back in March/April 2020 and I think what I posted still holds true. Masking and social distancing were effective early on to slow the spread. Once we learned how to treat covid and the numbers decreased over the summer, we should have allowed more normal life. When numbers get high, go back to social distancing and maskings. This is basically what sweeden did (from my very brief review).

"The most important conclusion from this work is that the timing of public health interventions had a profound influence on the pattern of the autumn wave of the 1918 pandemic in different cities. Cities that introduced measures early in their epidemics achieved moderate but significant reductions in overall mortality. Larger reductions in peak mortality were achieved by extending the epidemic for longer. We have not demonstrated this correlation only statistically, but we have also presented a plausible quantitative model that explains how such correlations arose. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that, in the cities that saw double-peaked autumn epidemics, control measures may have been, if anything, too effective, stopping transmission so effectively that substantial numbers of susceptible individuals remained in the population when controls were lifted. This remaining susceptible pool allowed transmission to restart, leading to another epidemic peak and (in some cases) to the resumption of interventions. Conversely, cities in which transmission had been continuing for longer before interventions were introduced saw much smaller or no second epidemic peaks, because insufficient susceptible people remained to restart transmission. The theory of imperfect interventions tells us there is an optimal middle ground, i.e., interventions tuned to give a single peak of minimal size. It appears no U.S. cities found that optimal point, however; indeed, the cities that got closest to the theoretical maximum possible reduction in mortality were those that implemented both early and effective interventions throughout the first peak and then were able to reintroduce these when transmission again increased."

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0611071104