Ooops, I must have de-selected that line.
Give me a bit.
It will be a long bit. I’m kinda watching Black Books w/ Stu, and drinking whiskey.
I was mostly responding to Lucy’s post, where someone said this is bad for kids and her response, they aren’t dying
Yes, when I think “anti vaxers and COVID deniers” I think of Lucy. 
But she shouldn’t feed their specious arguments
here’s the fixed graph:
All the lines were there, but I didn’t update the data labels so well. I GUESS legends have their place.
(and I will ignore whatever squabbling y’all are doing today. I have some very important candy to eat and booze to drink)
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Isn’t there a fair amount of evidence at this point that there has been a lot of “non-COVID” excess mortality in the last two years that truly lacks any other explanation other than it’s actually related to COVID? The MO coroner is not going to be an extreme outlier in how the certs are published - many families in rural America will want to deny that as a cause of death and have something else listed.
There has clearly been excess mortality from people “without COVID” (in the US). I call them pandemic-related deaths. Suicides, murders, drugs, under-treated cancer, other mental health-related issues. I agree there is net under-reporting of COVID deaths, somewhat offset by the “died with” COVID deaths.
Murders added about 5k additional (increase from PY) deaths in 2020. Overdoses I think were up 30k, and suicides actually declined slightly. There are hundreds of thousands of extra deaths in the US since the start of COVID beyond the official tally. I am sure some of them are related to delayed treatment, but also, most polls will show something like 5-25% of the population buying in to various conspiracies around COVID ranging from it’s completely fake to its no worse than the annual flu. You throw something like that on top of the COVID death counts and I think you can begin to make sense of remaining excess mortality as a factor of some of those other know consequences of the pandemic.
Setting this up on non-COVID excess deaths since the start of the pandemic, you see things that make sense like the excess mortality in the NE states in March of 2020 with little excess deaths since then…while states like Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona have regularly reported excess mortality, especially during the summer waves that hit the South.
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turning 50 seems like a bad thing based on this graph. Drat!
It’s better than the alternative.
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I’m not sure why the CEO and article’s writer don’t just come out and say: “all these additional deaths are due to Homicides, suicides and overdoses”. The CODs are on the Death Certificates.
interesting quote from the article
He said at the same time, the company is seeing an “uptick” in disability claims, saying at first it was short-term disability claims, and now the increase is in long-term disability claims.
I haven’t really thought much about disability increasing. Any disability experts have evidence on the pandemic effects on disability?
My thought was unemployment and underemployment, can lead to an increase in Individual DI, not necessarily fraudulent, but malingering.
If the group benefits continued during the layoffs, it could affect group as well
Add in all the increases in mental illness. I could definitely see an uptick
I don’t believe long hauler, is a major issue, but again could be it underemployed, or being forced back to the office
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What you see in Group is everyone applying for disability when they’re worried that they might get laid off. 50-70% of their salary (maybe some or all of it tax-free) is a lot better than unemployment for most folks.
Dental and vision claims also spike right before layoffs/furloughs as everyone goes to the dentist / optometrist one last time before they lose coverage.
Some union plans will stop paying disability benefits during a furlough, but generally the actions of the employer after the date of disability have no impact on the payability of the claim.
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Eh, even that is harsh, although it certainly describes some cases. (If you want some good stories, talk to the fraud team.)
A lot of disabilities are very subjective. People who like their jobs can and often do work through bona fide disabilities.
I’ll out myself to people who have heard me tell this story, but so be it. I once worked with a woman going through chemo. She would literally get chemo in the morning and come in and work in the afternoon. They moved her to the desk closest to the bathroom so she could get up and run to the bathroom and puke, and then she’d brush her teeth and get back to work. She absolutely qualified for disability. No reasonable employer or claims analyst would even think of questioning her claim.
The company had gold-plated benefits, including short-term disability that paid 100%. But she didn’t want to sit home collecting a full paycheck. Her friends were at work, her husband worked for the same company. She wanted to commute in with her husband and be with her friends at work.
But if she’d gotten wind that she might be getting laid off then she probably would’ve taken advantage of the disability policy and gone out on claim.
These are things that are hard to rate and reserve for. We don’t have a factor for “generally happy employees” vs “management really has their heads up their asses”. But it shows up in their experience. And during economic downturns.
To me it is anyone who if they needed to would go to the office, would if the benefit wasn’t available. Not meant to be harsh, I would say most people aren’t even conscience of it
Your person is extreme the other way, but maybe having somewhere to go kept her alive
I have great stories from my DI days
It certainly kept her spirits up, which is helpful when fighting cancer. We had a beloved boss who basically anyone on the team would have spit-shine the boss’s shoes if asked, so that contributed to a positive work environment. It was a dead end job, but I stayed longer than I should have because it was a good team of folks.
Another DI story from the same team: men got 4 weeks of company-paid paternity leave… if their wife had a baby. Not reading the fine print, one of my co-workers applied for paternity leave when his girlfriend had a baby. No dice.
When baby #2 was in the oven he proposed and they got married during her pregnancy and then he DID go on paternity leave for baby #2. My employer’s paternity leave policy resulted in at least one marriage that might not have otherwise taken place. Not sure whether that was by design or accident on the part of the company! 
A friend just posted this on a discord server. Gah, i don’t do Twitter, and my links and quotes are a mess, but you can probably make sense of them anyway:
Start link:
https://mobile.twitter.com/MicahPollak/status/1477727474003894274
If you’re going to trust anyone to know the real cost of #COVID19 in terms of deaths, trust life insurance companies. I was there for this online news conference and it was stunning. Deaths are up 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people.
End link
Anyway, my immediate reply was that if the mortality hit was anything like that high, I’d have heard about it from you guys. Is that right? Are the life insurance companies bleeding?
Oh cool, discourse understood the quotes.
Yes, many are. It also depends upon whether there are cash values and reinsurance. [sarcasm] But this is only temporary, right? [end]
However, lapses are lower because…there’s a pandemic and people see that they might die.