City Journal usually has good quality people who are smart and pay attention to the numbers and no what a source is, so I thought there might be good info in the Death By Policy post that looks at how many have died as a result of the lockdown rather than CoVid. I went first to the hyperlink about suicide, as it has come up here before. A month ago and more there were predictions about how many more suicides there would be based on the spike in unemployment and economic issues. The centerpiece was an ER doc from Walnut Creek CA shaking his head and saying "I've never seen anything like this." No numbers, not even from his hospital, let alone the country as a whole. It was all based on previous economic turndowns and what researchers thought might happen now. For conservatives who have been railing about not listening to experts, this seemed an unhealthy reliance on "experts" who happened to be saying what they wanted to hear.
Still, it's plausible, so I was excited to find that there is new data, that I might sift through and try to understand. But the "increased suicide" link just goes to that same story from May 21 and the doctor at a hospital in Walnut Creek shaking his head. That's pretty shoddy, and I didn't even bother to read the rest of Zinberg's article because I already know it. There might be more deaths because of the lockdown. Here are the reasons why that could happen, so we're pretty sure that's what's going to happen. We don't happen to have any actual data on that.
We'll see what shows up. It certainly can't be a good thing when people with chronic conditions are interrupted in their medical care. But right now, I don't see actual numbers supported by research. Zinberg does, BTW, give a good description of how cause of death is confusing and how CoVid might be overcounted or actually be undercounted. Basically, in most places you can't write it on the certificate unless you have a positive test, regardless of how good a match the symptoms are.
NH's numbers continue to drop, BTW, but I see that other parts of the country are having increased problems, both in deaths and ICU admissions.
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Nowhere do I see mentioned the huge number of iatrogenic deaths prevented by the medical system being closed down to non-COVID-19 patients.
I wondered about how much suicide would increase due to Covid. I had this idea in my head that suicide rates were higher in the wealthier countries. I figured it was a function of lack of struggle in one's life. I realize how simplistic that reasoning is, particularly since I didn't know who's killing themselves. Then I looked at the country ranking by suicide rate and the top three countries are Guyana, Lethoso, and Russia. Looking at the list, the only real connection I'm seeing is that suicide is really low in the Carribean. That's a roundabout way of saying I don't see how the reaction to Covid would necessarily raise suicide rates. I guess I should read the City Journal article to see how it might go up.
In a previous post, someone linked to an article about excess deaths in the UK. 65k as estimated by their Office of National Statistics. Here's the link:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-excess-deaths-uk-figures.html
I'm a little annoyed they don't tell us how much of a percentage increase that figure is. I mean, I can look it up, but I was taught in my engineering courses that a good engineer is a lazy engineer who doesn't recreate work already done by others. So, the article is limiting my potential for laziness.
Some interesting points they make are the excess death numbers include people who might have had Covid but weren't "picked up" and they also include people who died from measures to prevent Covid spread, e.g., cancelled routine operations. I wonder how the latter number stacks up to suicides. For the US, I'm curious to know what was the reduction in traffic deaths during the lockdown. Surely not enough to offset the Covid deaths, but it would be interesting to see what the reduction was.
There sure is a lot of "stands to reason" analysis going on, completely lacking in facts. The county judge in nearby Corpus Christi (pop. 400K) is hyperventilating on TV that the Medical Examiner's office is in danger of being overwhelmed by an recent increase in COVID deaths (16), and stating excitedly that she's asked for FEMA refrigerated trucks in case the local funeral homes can't keep up. The ME's office doesn't even take the bodies of people who die under a doctor's care of a known disease. No one from the ME's office or the funeral homes is sounding an alarm, not even about their fears of massive levels of death that may happen in the future, let alone about 16 deaths in a week in a city of that size.
I was very unhappy, early in the lockdown debacle, to see conservatives arguing that a bazillion people would die of suicide, drawing their conclusions out of thin air. Even if I thought it were plausible, I'd sooner face the deaths of people who don't want to live than the deaths of people cut down by a disease we could avoid or minimize. My objection to the lockdown was not that it would kill people but that it would not clearly save many people over the next year or so, and would have other horrific costs that are easily quantifiable and demonstrable. I favor varying levels of isolation depending on how vulnerable each group is. You can pull that off without destroying 40 million jobs.
We often have to make difficult, contingent preparations on the basis of things that may or may not happen. That's hard enough when we think carefully about costs and benefits and a sliding scale of confidence in projections. It's lunacy when we decide that any possibility, however remote, must be given the same weight as every other possibility. What else is the climate panic about? I see this tendency to confuse reality with a possible future playing out in constant media stories along the lines of a classic piece from the NYT this week: "What will Trump's NH rally look like? It's too early to tell." Sterile speculation about the future, plus some panic, no actual news. "What's going to happen? We don't know, but we're happy to blather about it at length."
This isn't prudence. It's mental spasms.
I should keep a notebook for my back-of-the-envelope calculations relating to current events, as I did this one earlier. I can't remember where I got the association between unemployment rate and the suicide rate.
Probably here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305206195_OP67_Increase_in_State_Suicide_Rates_in_the_USA_During_Economic_Recession
They show that a 1% rise in the unemployment rate leads to almost a 1% rise in the suicide rate ([0.60, 1.38], p < 0.0001). So for the few years of the 2008 recession for the USA that's an estimated 4750 excess suicide deaths (2750 as the min bound, 6920 max).
Comparison of US unemployment rates then and now is here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=sPEL
One then needs to calculate if what proportion of those job losses would not have occurred without lockdown.
In April when I did this I pretty much assumed "situation as in a normal year" vs "unemployment 3 times higher than the 2008 recession" as if all the excess unemployment is because of the government lockdown mandates. So that nets us ~14,250 deaths by suicide, vs ??? lives saved by the lockdown.
And going by the IHME model as it stood at the time, it was pretty to compare the difference between the "with lockdown" and "without lockdown" lines on the projections for number of deaths. Any way I sliced it, lives saved by lockdown were many times greater than lives lost by lockdown-related suicide.
The great recession had near 10% unemployment rate for a long time, we aren't seeing triple that, more like double that at a brief maximum. So one only needs to find 9500 lives saved by lockdown in the entire USA to make lockdown the preferred option in this equation.
@ Unknown. A very interesting way to process the data. We are guessing, but educated, reasoned guesses are more valuable than the "it just seems as if" reasoning we often get - including even from supposedly knowledgeable people. Your reasoning seems to grab at the most likely scenarios and notes the correct possibilities where this situation might be different from other downturns.
I would only add one of my continuing soapboxes, that the government lockdowns and the voluntary shutdowns are related, but different. Even if governments at all levels had not even issued guidelines and just said "Well kids, you're all on your own!" the economic impact would have been enormous. Actually, I will mention that again in another post.
An interesting attempt at sorting through excess death numbers and their possible interpretations: https://www.city-journal.org/deadly-cost-of-lockdown-policies
@ Texan99 - LOL. So you didn't follow the link in my post, which I took exception to.
Oh, that's funny, you're right--I didn't click on that link, and didn't realize I was posting the same one you'd already commented on unfavorably.
So reading it now, my take is that the City Journal guy did try to make reasonable sense of the "excess deaths" and their several possible causes, such as delayed treatment while the hospitals were restricted. The articles I'd previously read about higher levels of suicides didn't do as persuasive a job. For one thing, they were almost completely predictive, whereas the City Journal article had some data to report for the last several months.
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