250,000 Americans have died from COVID

Read: "Thanks for more data confirming significant years of life (~10) have been lost on average; however, it doesn't confirm my insane conspiracy theories so I will, again, outright reject it" Your "analytical" shtick isn't fooling anyone.

Ok, first, it's not like these scientists are just ignoring co-morbidities.

From the study:

"A significant aspect of COVID-19 deaths in calculating YLLs is that many of those who died of the disease had significant pre-existing medical conditions. Such deaths could be considered as displaced mortality in that these individuals on average would likely not reach the full life expectancy reported in actuarial tables. In their forecast model of COVID-19 deaths in the UK based on data from Italy, Hanlon et al. (2020) estimated that the greater pre-existing morbidity of those who died of COVID-19 reduced the estimated YLLs per COVID-19 death from 14 to 13 for men and 12 to 11 for women.15 In our analysis, we conservatively reduced the expected life expectancy by 25% to reflect the typically greater morbidity of COVID-19 decedents."

Here's Hanlon, et al:

The used various data sources to factor in types and # of cormorbidities into their estimates.

And a critique here:

I agree YLL is not a perfect measurement -- nothing is.

Read the comments on the Hanlon paper if you want more discussion.

A few key points

1) Most older people have co-morbidities. The effect a co-morbidity has on life expectancy decreases as your cohort gets older, because bCM's get more common and this gets factored into life expectancy calculations. The preprint here has a reasonable discussion:

Paragraph here:

An important variable that this and other studies have not been able to adequately incorporate into this analysis is the effect of comorbidities on life expectancy of COVID-19 deaths which is due to a lack of appropriate statistical information. This must, therefore, be considered a potential source of error. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is known to infect and replicate in many different tissues and exacerbates problems in several organ systems including the kidney, liver, heart, lungs and brain (Lu et al., 2020; Chandrashekar et al., 2020). Any individual with problems in these systems or the immune system is likely to be more vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 infection and suffer more severe outcomes as has been demonstrated for immune deficiencies. In addition, other health states qualifying as pre-existing conditions, such as obesity, hypertension, chronic kidney disease and diabetes are known comorbidity factors for COVID-19 (see CDC co-morbidity tables and references therein;

) and these cohorts of individuals have a shorter than average predicted life span. Deaths due to complications with pre-existing comorbid conditions would artificially increase the person-years lost in these calculations but are difficult to quantitate in this current analysis. However, most people over the age of 60 have comorbidities so these are already factored into the longevity tables. For example, one of the largest co-morbidity factors is diabetes (Table 10, 33,100 deaths out of 201,000, or 16.5% of COVID-19 deaths) and diabetes is thought to shorten life expectancy by approximately 8 years per individual and has lowered overall average life expectancy in the US by 0.83 and 0.89 years for males and females, respectively (Preston et al., 2018b). However, the prevalence of diabetes is 10.4% in the general population and its effects on life expectancy has already been factored into the actuarial tables. Thus, approximately 6% of the 194,000 COVID-19 deaths in our analysis, 11,640 in total, are likely due to excess diabetes deaths over the average amount in the population. This would result in an excess of 93,120 person-years, but this would need to be further adjusted for excess deaths per age because on average people over 80 years old have less than 8 years of residual life expectancy. As a result, diabetes may have less than a 4% impact on the current estimates as not all deaths are in individuals with a known co-morbidity. However, other comorbidities listed in Table 10 are actually at a lower prevalence than in the general population, i.e. Alzheimer’s disease and hypertension, and could be due to undercounting due to multiple comorbidities. Thus, it is not yet clear how to fully interpret these data and adjust our calculations. We include a 15% estimate of reduction in PYLL in the summary table (Table 11)."

2) You would need to make the case that people dying of COVID are extremely different that the 'reference' population used to calculate the baseline statistics. Is there a large stratification of severity among comorbidities that would affect the estimates by an order of magnitude? Maybe, but I haven't seen any evidence.

3). I'll admit that "10 years lost" is too simple an answer, but people are making claims that the true number is something around ~1 or less! It seems unlikely that those dying of COVID are so different than the rest of the elderly, comorbid population yet nobody has found data to support it. All these attempts to model have taken into account comorbidities in varyingly sophisticated ways from modeling in comorbidity data to just an arbitrary reduction in their final estimates.

Sorry, you can't just handwave away these studies and then try to push glaringly wrong arguments that use even more simple, uninformed math and data.

trashcan wrote:

This is the best data I can find re: years of life lost and comorbidity.

https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75

Upshot was accounting for comorbidities 11-13 years. If you have better studies or data please link

Thanks for this. At least this doesn't try to hide the long-term conditions like that other 'study'. However, as they admitted:

"However, although we had data for eleven common and important LTCs, we did not have markers of underlying disease severity among those who died. Severity of the underlying LTC has considerable impact on life expectancy28. Moreover, we had no data for rarer severe LTCs, which may nonetheless be common among those who die from COVID-19 at younger ages."

And:

"Also, we were not able to adjust our estimates for other factors and exposures (such as socioeconomic status, occupation, smoking, health behaviours) which would have given a more accurate representation of life-expectancy in the absence of COVID-19."

Considering obesity is a huge risk factor and isn't technically an LTC, not talking health behaviors into account seems like an oversight.[/quote]

People with obesity are often comorbid with heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, etc. Obesity, per se, is less of an issue than the large amounts of LTCs it makes you at high risk for. I'd wager that most effects are obesity are baked into the other LTC data.

I would agree with everything Harambe says. In addition I’ve heard body positivity advocates argue that obesity isn’t a cause of mortality as long as there aren’t the problems of hypertension or hyperlipidemia or diabetes or cardiovascular disease or osteoarthritis and presumably a Bunch of other comorbidities. This may be true (especially as those disorders are a Problem for the population as a whole).. The problem of course is that with a long enough period of obesity you almost certainly will get some of these negative health predictors.

[quote]trashcan wrote:

I would agree with everything Harambe says.

Harambee merely parrots everything he sees and hears from mainstream media.

trashcan wrote:

I would agree with everything Harambe says. In addition I’ve heard body positivity advocates argue that obesity isn’t a cause of mortality as long as there aren’t the problems of hypertension or hyperlipidemia or diabetes or cardiovascular disease or osteoarthritis and presumably a Bunch of other comorbidities. This may be true (especially as those disorders are a Problem for the population as a whole).. The problem of course is that with a long enough period of obesity you almost certainly will get some of these negative health predictors.

Hard to imagine someone could post two such inane statements in succession.

But then I looked specifically and found that bmi

Greater than 40 gives you an independent risk factor increase of 60 percent (odds ratio 1.6 ). if you are older than 50, and an odds ratio of 5.1 if you are younger than 50. That indicates that it is a factor although not a huge factor.

browski wrote:

trashcan wrote:

I would agree with everything Harambe says. In addition I’ve heard body positivity advocates argue that obesity isn’t a cause of mortality as long as there aren’t the problems of hypertension or hyperlipidemia or diabetes or cardiovascular disease or osteoarthritis and presumably a Bunch of other comorbidities. This may be true (especially as those disorders are a Problem for the population as a whole).. The problem of course is that with a long enough period of obesity you almost certainly will get some of these negative health predictors.

Hard to imagine someone could post two such inane statements in succession.

I thought they didn't allow phones in 5th grade math class.

voted out, pants out wrote:

Rainy Day wrote:

I don’t wish death on anyone, but we all die eventually. The 250K number sounds huge, but it’s still less than a 0.1% of the population. Again, a majority of those people that died are elderly with other health conditions and a poor quality of life.

Those people should take extreme precautions. The rest of us should use good judgment.

What did the original lockdowns do? It just delayed the inevitable that this virus is going to spread.

ummm....you realize there is a vaccine coming, right? ....and that delaying spread saves thousands of lives right?

Nope, these folks have made up their minds and do not wish to be confused with your "facts" and "logic."

Regarding agreeing with her all day, I was specifically Speaking regarding his two posts regarding the study. They do accurately reflect the study. Do people now consider scientific publications MSM?

Also, it seems a bit surprising that you would have an issue with me criticizing body Positivity advocates for misreading the data by missing the forest for the trees.

Harambe is a her? I never realized.

I wasn't talking about you disagreeing with "body positivity advocates", I was laughing at the insanity of even listening to them.

CarbonFiberJoe wrote:

Keep trying to make 2.7 days of life expectancy sound like a big deal.

In any case I don't see why I should trade months of lockdowns for 2.7 extra days of life expectancy.

At this point you should just move to Belarus man, not sure what to tell you. The USA is lost to the leftists, am I right?

Yeah, fun autocorrect, but if we all stop listening to everyone we disagree with, where will we end up?......Oh, I think I’m starting to see.....

trashcan wrote:

Yeah, fun autocorrect, but if we all stop listening to everyone we disagree with, where will we end up?......Oh, I think I’m starting to see.....

Yeah. I think most of us are done listening. At least we agree on that!

browski wrote:

Harambe is a her? I never realized.

I wasn't talking about you disagreeing with "body positivity advocates", I was laughing at the insanity of even listening to them.

It's funny -- trashcan brought up an argument they had heard, related it to the current discussion, and looked up their own stats to confirm/reject the idea. All in all useful contribution.

You just laser in on some Culture Wars term and only want to sidetrack the discussion to laugh at it over multiple posts -- even though it's tangential to the conversation at best.

^^this is your brain on too much partisan politics. Everyone reading, take note.

Harambe wrote:

This is false "joed1rt 2" (what is with all these deniers using multiple usernames?).

It can only be listed there if it is the most underlying cause of death. It is fraud to knowingly write the cert. otherwise.

What dream world do you live in? All that is needed is a positive test or even a presumed positive (it's why places like New York and New Jersey sifted through old death certificates in late April and early May and re-classified a number of deaths as COVID without tests). People could be in the last stage of dying and if they have COVID, they get counted.

If you want to know why "deniers" as you call them (reasonable sceptics are how I would refer to them) are posting under multiple user names is because those who would prefer to censor the voices of reason of unregistered posters have been registering user names of individuals they disagree with.

There have been 10 LRC threads on this exact issue and you've been wrong every time. There is zero evidence for over-counting. Poor Harambe must have sore hands from slapping you losers around all year.

kibitzer wrote:

voted out, pants out wrote:

ummm....you realize there is a vaccine coming, right? ....and that delaying spread saves thousands of lives right?

Nope, these folks have made up their minds and do not wish to be confused with your "facts" and "logic."

Where are the facts that show how many lives the first lockdown saved? The numbers are all over the place with open areas and low death rates and lockdowns with high death rates. Again, not even the experts can agree on the efficacy of the lockdowns.

If you are scared, stay home until the vaccine is released. I’m willing to risk it.

You put your life at risk everyday by driving a car, and you also put other people’s lives at risk. However the benefit of getting places in a timely manner outweighs the risk of dying in a car accident.

The benefit of my freedom to travel and gather with friends and family outweighs the fraction of a percent probability that I contract COVID and die. If people want to hang out with me, cool. If they don’t, I don’t hold it against them.

joedurt wrote:

What dream world do you live in? All that is needed is a positive test or even a presumed positive (it's why places like New York and New Jersey sifted through old death certificates in late April and early May and re-classified a number of deaths as COVID without tests). People could be in the last stage of dying and if they have COVID, they get counted.

If you want to know why "deniers" as you call them (reasonable sceptics are how I would refer to them) are posting under multiple user names is because those who would prefer to censor the voices of reason of unregistered posters have been registering user names of individuals they disagree with.

This is not true. The CDC guidelines are here:

Note that COVID-19 is listed as the underlying cause -- the main cause of death --- on 92+% of death certificates involving COVID. You are accusing millions of doctors of widespread, months long fraud for a paltry 20% premium.

As for testing, docters are strongly encouraged to test all patients suspected of COVID but I'd imagine there were some times in the Northeast in March and April where there simply weren't enough tests go around. Considering COVID-19 was by far the dominant respiratory cause of death in those places at the time, presumptive COVID diagnoses postmortem likely aren't shifting the stats too much.

The payments you are talking about are a 20% premium for COVID patients being covered by Medicare in the hospital. This was part of the CARES act passed by the Trump admin -- so you're saying the blame rests with his administration for somehow encouraging inflated death counts? Quite ridiculous but you have already made up your mind and will discard any evidence to the contrary.