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Non-Covid Excess Deaths, 2020-21 [pdf] (nber.org)
4 points by droptablemain on June 14, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


Elderly heart and diabetes related deaths were way up so clearly we did a poor job of managing those conditions for them in isolation. I guess this is why the health officials were (in part) so slow to adopt any new measures: everything has externalities.

I'm curious why the rate of increase is like 2x for alcohol as compared to drugs. As a layman, I'd perhaps naively assume those would closely track. Homicide and alcohol related deaths being way up is distressing but makes sense in the context of social stress, just curious about that drug/alcohol difference.


>I'm curious why the rate of increase is like 2x for alcohol as compared to drugs. As a layman, I'd perhaps naively assume...

As a naive layman I think I've realized my mistake. In absolute terms, drug deaths are much higher but alcohol deaths have seen larger percentage increase, but in absolute terms the relative number of deaths makes sense (to me anyways).


Wow.

"While Covid deaths overwhelmingly afflict senior citizens, absolute numbers of non-Covid excess deaths are similar for each of the 18-44, 45-64, and over-65 age groups, with essentially no aggregate excess deaths of children."

Wow, so there were as many non-Covid excessive deaths as there were Covid deaths.

That's a high price to pay.


> Wow, so there were as many non-Covid excessive deaths as there were Covid deaths.

Not only does that not follow from the part you’ve quoted, it wouldn’t follow if you’d quoted the entire paper.




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