Both parents made it well into 90s as well. So he’s got that going for him too.
of course, those sausage hands don’t look great. Not sure why he has such awful edema.
It’s been a while, but I’ve finally been pushed over the edge…
I did reach out to the authors of the paper re: their data. It will get released once they get through peer review (so that may take a while). I understand being limited for what they can get, and I do want to try their models separate from the data issue I mention in my post.
So the conclusion is Yes, Covid killed more Righties than Lefties
I don’t consider it a dunk on enemies as much as a dunk on idiots who believe what other idiots (or smart manipulators) tell them, and die more frequently as a result.
Or, a giant “I told you so” about vaccines.
Yes, because they’re old.
There are multiple problems, which I mention in the post.
Plenty of Repubs did vaccinate (I did! Trump did.) and plenty of Dems did not (I know many, and they can speak for themselves). If you want to make the vax case, as I said, then make that case – please stop doing the partisan shit, because it makes it more difficult to persuade (and then the anti-vax Dems, who do exist, start getting pushed to the Repub side, which I think the Dems would rather not have happen). Correlate to vaccination rates - not partisan rates. There are age (older people more likely to vax, younger less likey) and race (Asians most likely to vax) differences.
[There’s a problem with the “I told you so” take, too – mainly for the people who did what they were supposed to do, and still got bad outcomes. This is where people end up hating actuaries, so we will move on]
Most of the large numbers/correlations they’re talking about here are old people dying (and the vax rates for old people have been pretty high, no matter their partisan affiliation - the low rate of vaccinations is mainly from younger adults)… it is getting to be difficult to tease apart various correlations with confounding variables.
Re: the lies on the vaccines have been more around young adults than old adults, and I’ve been driven nuts around this. I have already written about the sources of excess mortality for young adults: drug ODs, homicides, motor vehicle accidents mostly.
I have had people arguing w/ me that young adults were self-medicating after bad vax experiences and thus ODing (I pointed out the jump up in OD deaths started in spring 2020, not 2021) – then they tried to argue that maybe people were having bad reactions to vaccinations and that caused the motor vehicle accidents (as opposed to the speeding which is the main cause, other than DUIs… also, the increases did start in 2020, well before the vaccines). In general, they’ve stopped bugging me, but man.
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“GODDAMMIT YOU HAVE A RATIONAL ANSWER FOR EVERYTHING!!! I HATE YOU!!! I NEED AN INFORMATION SOURCE THAT AGREES WITH ME 110%!!!”
Well, mostly I think I bore them til they go away. It’s the primary defense of the actuary.
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I am sure you can poke holes in studies in the media and question their motives, but the conclusion at the end of the day is always going to be that people who took more precautions with COVID died less. Texas and California are big states with large cities and diverse populations, and Texas had like 40-50% more COVID deaths in spite of being a little bit younger. I don’t think you can explain all that away from politics…but on the other side of the equation was the decision that the Republican policymakers generally had more business friendly COVID policies and I expect they can point to more successful small businesses over the past 2.5 years.
I friend likes to show odd graphs of differences around the country with a tagline “every graph of the US looks the same”.
I often get to the end of an answer and think of that scene in “groundhog day” where bill murray gives a long winded answer to a weather inquiry - did you really want to talk about the weather or were you just making chit chat?
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Well, it’s not like the continents move much… or at least rapidly…
[yes, I know what you meant. I am just being a smartass]
as someone responded to me on twitter:
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I share this pet peeve. Just divide it by the population at whatever level you’re interested in (state, county, ZCTA, etc) and show the percentages.
I was going to ask for your thoughts on this article.
Given I’ve pretty much been looking at the same stats as he did these 3-ish years at this point, then yes, I’ve noticed the same patterns.
I do agree that some of the excess mortality for heart disease may be actually undiagnosed COVID, especially given that some of the natural causes of death are in sync w/ the COVID waves and some are not.
It is a reach to try to make COVID directly related to the external causes of death (homicide, suicide, drug ODs, motor vehicle accidents, etc.) – to be sure, it is likely related to a chain of events, such as lockdowns, stimulus cash to spend on booze/drugs and not much other entertainment, etc. – but it seems some of those external causes are coming back down, and some are not.
In particular, the drug ODs seem to continue on their bad trend, while homicides and motor vehicle accident deaths may be dropping again. But it’s too soon to tell - these can be pretty volatile.
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not too long; just read it
180,000 more people died than normally expected in Germany during the Covid years
World
20 January 2023
LEHTIKUVA / AFP
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During the Covid years from 2020 to 2022, around 180,000 more people died in Germany than would have been normally expected. This is the finding of calculations by the ifo Institute. “The elderly were especially poorly protected,” says Joachim Ragnitz, Managing Director of ifo Dresden. In the 80+ age group alone, 116,000 more people died than expected; in the 60–79 age group, the figure was 51,000. In the large age group of 30–59, on the other hand, there were only 12,000 additional deaths and only about 900 among those aged 0–29.
Per 100,000 people, excess mortality was 640 in the 80+ age group, and 92 in the 60–79 age group. In the two youngest age groups, relative excess mortality was much lower, at 12 and 1, respectively.
“What’s surprising is that excess mortality accelerated again in 2022,” Ragnitz says. There were about 39,000 additional deaths in 2020, 68,000 in 2021, and nearly 74,000 in 2022. “The exact reasons for this are still unclear. The heat waves in the summer and the flu waves at the end of the year probably also played a role,” he adds.
To calculate the expected number of deaths, the ifo Institute takes the average for the years before the Covid-19 pandemic (2016–2019) and adjusts for rising life expectancy and changes in the age structure.
HT
Source: ifo Insitute
For my L&H brothers and sisters, what are your thoughts on this mortality report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries for the 2022 year?
Ages 20-44 are 7.8% higher for 2022 compared to 2019 (would be better to use a 5 year pre pandemic average I suppose but this is what we have).
In the UK, the second half of 2022 had 26,300 excess deaths, compared to 4,700 in the first half of 2022. What’s going on here? Omicron dominated during this time, dry tinder/the vulnerable have likely died off from Covid, and the UK population is pretty highly vaccinated.
TIA
CMI says 2022 had the worst second half for mortality since 2010
UK Covid deaths* were 26K and 14K for the 1st half and 2nd half of 2022. So I conclude that the UK in 2022 had around 9K “negative” excess deaths. The 1st half had great non-Covid experience while the 2nd half was poor. Was the UK “shut down” in the 1st half, contributing to better non-Covid mortality? How was non-Covid mortality* during 2021?
*impossible to precisely measure