my understanding is that most governments aren’t doing a good job keeping track of the number who died from covid so some groups are using excess death rates compared to expected death rates to determine deaths.
I believe the excess deaths since covid started are around 7-10 million globally as of roughly now. but how do you factor in all the nuances in that figure?
example: some people couldn’t get the medical care they needed so they died when they would’ve lived had covid not existed. is that a covid death, if someone with severe diabetes couldn’t get medical care at a hospital?
But it goes in the other direction too. are deaths from car or workplace accidents down? I’m driving less than half the miles I used to drive in 2019, so my risk of a car accident death is lower.
also what about deaths from other infectious person to person diseases? covid probably saved a lot of people who would’ve died from TB, the flu and some other infectious diseases.
point being do excess deaths factor this in? like what if there are ten million global excess deaths but there are also (made up number) five million fewer deaths from non-covid infectious diseases due to social distancing, masks and better public hygiene compared to a regular year? does that mean fifteen million people died from covid or do they factor that in?
The idea behind excess death calculations is that the aggregate all effects, positive and negative. So if, say, 5 million people died of Covid, and 1 million people died of other conditions which could have been successfully treated but weren’t because the hospitals were full of Covid patients, but deaths due to flu, etc, are down by 2 million because Covid quarantining measures are also effective to prevent transmission of flu, etc, then that translates into (5 + 1 - 2 =) 4 million excess deaths.
I would agree - but it would indeed be interesting to see the components that go into the total excess deaths. I don’t know if any reliable sources have posted such estimates. If anyone happens across such stats, post 'em here!
The components of the calculation are basically pretty simple - number of deaths registered this year, versus numbers of deaths registered in previous years. Make appropriate adjustments for demographic factors — if the number of elderly people in the country is higher this year than in previous years then deaths are going to go up anyway, and vice versa, so you have to allow for that — and bob’s your uncle.
The point is that the technique completely bypasses contentious questions like whether a particular death is correctly attributed to Covid or not, or how to categorise deaths where multiple factors are at work, of which Covid is only one.
We observe that, during the pandemic period there was, say, 400,000 more deaths in a particular society than we would have expected based on experience in previous years, and we attribute that mainly to the impact of the pandemic on that society. The actual number of people who died from the pandemic disease may have been more 400,000 (but there were offsets from, e.g., flu deaths averted) or it may have been less (but total deaths were higher because people died of other causes when the medical services were overwhelmed); the excess deaths technique doesn’t yield details like that.
Some of the components that people are curious about are measured, though. In the US we know that in 2020
Motor vehicle fatalities were up, because while fewer people drove, they apparently drove way faster
Suicides are down
Overdoses, however, are up by a larger amount than suicides are down
Those are numbers I’ve seen directly recently. I did also listen to a JAMA podcast about deaths from heart disease being down, despite interventional surgeries for heart disease being down, which was interesting, but I didn’t hear any actual numbers.
There’s an additional point, I’d like to make, concerning how Covid-19 changes the population of earth.
It’s not just deaths by and prevented deaths by it but also prevented births by it. How does Covid-19 prevent births you may ask.
Social distancing will definately curb down teenage pregnancies.
Covid-19 causes temporary sterility in males.
Haven’t heard on 2. Just google it and you’ll find out studies and even youtube videos by respectable mds and scientists, but I can tell you my own story also.
I had Covid-19 sometime in late March early April 2020. In may I noticed that my ejaculate has no swimmers. I contacted my doctor and she started to look into it. Longe story short, there was nothing special to do. Now it’s June 2021 and last I ejaculated I saw some swimmers in there but it still was not much. All sources I’ve seen tell me that eventually my testes return to full functionality.
How does this affect births. It will clearly make a dip in births but will it actualy lower the population will be seen.
You can’t tell from a visual examination at home whether your ejaculate has sperm in it. Sperm are microscopic - invisible to the naked eye. Whatever you were seeing and then stopped seeing and are now seeing again, it wasn’t sperm cells.
Pandemics often are associated with a fall in the birthrate but, in the past at any rate, this has often been followed by a bounce and, with hindsight, whatever the the long-term trend in the birthrate was, it is maintained. It remains to be seen whether that’s what’ll happen this time around, but there is no reason at this point to expect not.
[quote=“UDS1, post:9, topic:944354, full:true”]
You can’t tell from a visual examination at home whether your ejaculate has sperm in it.[/quote]
Yes you can. Ejaculate without sperm is clear and with it milky white.
Before my covid-19 sterility when I masturbated my ejaculate was thick and white and after it was clear and wet. Now it’s still wet but not clear anymore so the testes has srtated to recover. Eventually they will get to the full functionality. Which in 60-year old male is not the same as in a 20-year old male. But still potent enugh to cause swelling in those it poisons.
I had a vasectomy over 20 years ago and my ejaculate is still milky white, and with all the raw dogging I’ve done over the last 2 decades, I certainly don’t have any more kids to show for it.
Whether or not semen visibly changes, COVID-19 definitely causes loss of male fertility. It’s thought to be temporary, but they don’t know for sure.
How much this will change population growth going forward is a good question. Usually female fertility, not male, is the important factor in population growth. But it’ll probably reduce growth at least a bit, just because some couples are not interested in having a baby from some other man, no matter how it’s accomplished.
I don’t think the word “definitely” means what you think it means. The study you linked to suggests that it may have that effect. That’s not definite.
Another issue with excess-death calculations is that they don’t distinguish between deaths due to the disease, and deaths due to the response to the disease. Social distancing, for instance, is very dangerous, especially to seniors (the people most likely to have been social distancing). If a large number of seniors died due to social distancing, that could be interpreted from the numbers as “Look, Covid really was dangerous, look at all of these excess deaths! For a disease that dangerous, social distancing was absolutely the right response!”.
I wish I had a nickel for every discussion I start about science and disease that ends up being a discussion about ejaculate. I’d have so many nickels.
That’s the point. The excess deaths calculation factors in all the consequences of the pandemic - positive and negative, direct and indirect - and nets them out. So it’s good at telling you the overall impact; not so hot when it comes to the nitty-gritty.
Plus, it only tells you what did happen, not what could have happened. If we had less social distancing, presumably more people would have died of Covid and fewer of the indirect consequences of social distancing. Would that translate, on balance, into more deaths overall, or fewer? An excess deaths calculation won’t help to answer that question.