“With covid vs from covid.” The idiocy that just won’t die.
The basic argument is that we can’t trust doctors to tell the truth about the cause of death. And the argument seems to generally be made by people who don’t tell the truth themselves. Perhaps they think that everyone is the habitual liar that they are.
—Peter
Exactly what I was thinking. This narrative that only a handful of people actually die from covid has been around for two years, usually propagated by the same people who tell people to refuse to wear a mask or be vaccinated. As a Presidential press secretary said, some years ago, “we use alternate facts”.
Steve
That’s not really the argument. IIRC, the argument is that hospital guidelines call for the reporting of the number of hospitalizations (and then deaths) for patients who have tested positive for covid.
For the past six months Massachusetts has been having the reports also include the number primarily hospitalized for covid as well as those with the virus. There is a large difference.
DB2
Well, the article you posted starts off with the deaths from vs. with nitwittery so it seems to me that deaths was very much on the mind of the author.
Life expectancy in US has dropped by 2.7 years over the last three years after consistently increasing every year from wwII to 2019. That is a pretty good cross check on the impact of Covid on mortality. IMNSHO.
Of course there were many many deaths FROM Covid…people shouldn’t be arguing against this.
But if the data were available it would be interesting to know how those 2.7 years are proportioned between deaths FROM Covid vs deaths due to things like suicide (the rate went up by 86% during 2020 according to one study), postponed surgeries, failure to go to the doctor/hospital due to covid, etc.
Mike
Plenty of graduate students and their professors will be studying this in coming years. If a heart disease patient delayed their stent due to covid issues at hospitals, and later died prematurely, then covid did indirectly contribute to that death. If social restrictions caused by covid protection protocols caused an increase in suicide, then covid indirectly contributed to those deaths. In short, if the only real change over 2020-23 was the covid pandemic, and expected death rates went up, in the absence of some additional widespread cause, it is reasonable to conclude that covid, and its associated secondary effects (hospital crowding/staff/restrictions, social/school/isolation, etc), indeed are the cause of the spike in premature death.
Agreed. But if COVID restrictions caused (for example) half of the additional deaths, then we would expect that we wouldn’t see anywhere near that level in future years. So we could see a bump up in life expectancy in a year or two
Mike
It depends on how long lasting the effects of the restrictions are. If a large cohort began using drugs during the covid period, the effects could last for a very long time. If a large cohort fell behind in school during the covid period, then their feelings of less worth may linger for a very long time. Etc.
There are numerous studies covering those topics which answer many of your questions and which prove that Covid deaths are undercounted. Start with the JAMA article from November 2022 looking at excess deaths comparing US and twenty comparable countries as well the least and most vaccinated states,
I’d say the vaccines have already given us most of the lost life expectancy back.
This is a mischaracterization. The reason deaths are rising is because of how contagious Omicron is. There are many more cases. The death rate among Covid patients is down considerably per 100000.
The other mischaracterization I heard on the radio today had to do with Long Covid. Long Covid when intubation was happening is very different than today with Omicron. Many patients were dying after intubation. Today with Omicron the long covid cases are recouping in about twelve months at most and in most cases.