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Why is it> The point is that many of the people who's underlying conditions made them susceptible to Covid may well have dies within 2 years anyway. So we need to see what the death rate is in the next 2 years to see if it is lower, than average thereby balancing out the figures. If after this time it is still higher I'd reckon that would give you a clearer view of the death rate purely due to covid.Originally Posted by The Lone Gunman
Many people in their 80s will die within the next few years - does that mean you shouldn't help them now?
Should we not treat cancers in people over 85?
I agree with you entirely. i'm not in any way suggesting it is acceptable or good, but it may be a fact! that's all.
Sometimes they can’t as the chemo is too much…..
If I understand you correctly, I don't understand you.
Everyone dies - most of us are agreed on that. Everyone dies just once - also generally agreed (not sure about Truthpaste!)
When a pandemic hits the excess death figures must be balanced at a later date by lower than normal death figures (allowing for the graph to adjust for changes to life expectancy etc). The impact of the pandemic when it comes to deaths is premature deaths.
I have no problem with the Covid death figures - where the measure is people who have died solely due to Covid (even then the actual cause of death will not be the virus) and those for whom underlying health factors were triggered by the virus bringing on severe illness and death that wouldn't have happened at that time.
Where excess deaths gets a bit difficult is where the 'collatoral damage' in a stressed health service leads to more deaths of people where the cause had nothing to do with Covid. Even then it is not a simple case of saying that Covid prevention measures and/or swamped hospitals caused those non-Covid deaths - in those cases where the Covid prevention measures didn't actually protect those vulnerable people.
As other posters have said the government could take other action to mitigate the impact - more/less restrictions, clearer advice and information, added screening capacity, having a pandemic emergency plan that was up to date and properly resourced, different budget choices.
I don't think there is any readily available data set for the UK that can separate those strands out. In the absence of that we get more circular arguments that go nowhere.
Again, I agree with you. One cannot disregard a person's death or say "He would have died anyway" for as you rightly point out we all die anyway.
Your comment about 'premature' deaths is the point.
If we now have a higher than historical death rate now since Mar 20 but over the same period going forward we have a lower than historical rate then that should give us more of a realistic idea of the excess deaths overall. It will suggest that certain vulnerable people who died may have died anyway in the following period, just that their death was sooner than expected. That is not a good thing of course but if you can imagine the death rate being affected by the virus like a wave, after a peak comes a trough and there is a mean line across both. Any residual excess deaths across the peak and trough will give a clearer picture.
This seems about right. The time dimension is critical here. Excess deaths are time specific. And excess deaths this period means a reduced number of expected deaths next period.
There are three scenarios to compare excess deaths for the pandemic:
1. Actuality - pandemic, mitigation
2. Counter factual 1 - no pandemic
3. Counter factual 2 - pandemic, no mitigation
My guess is we'll eventually find excess deaths in the three scenarios will run 3 > 1 > 2.
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