You also have this effect where this year diagnosed cases of heart attacks and appendicitis are lower than last year. Can't blame people for not showing up at the hospital because that's where the plague is. This kind of excess death where people with serious conditions avoid hospital because of fear of disease isn't coronavirus but clearly caused by coronavirus.

is it caused by the coronavirus or the excessive measures taken to handle the coronavirus?

shutting down half the hospital when there is no need to for example

The shutdown wouldn't happen if the coronavirus wasn't spreading. It's the indirect cause, remove it and the hospitals aren't shut down.

you are confusing the response with the disease - mandating that people cannot go to go to the beach is not caused by the virus, it is caused by a bureaucrat. There is no evidence whatsoever that going to a beach causes infections. If anything makes your body stronger and more able to cope with a disease.

Exposure to the virus is how you get the virus. If there are other people at the beach, some of them might be infected, and you're being exposed by being in proximity. Maybe if you're Far Enough Away you can limit the exposure, but are people really Social Distancing on beaches and in restaurants? Evidence so far suggests the answer is no.

Incidentally there is also a lot of data out there suggesting that the virus can travel through the air a pretty reasonable distance, and it's likely to be breezy on the beach.

In any case, why would a bureaucrat want to go out of their way to close hospitals if there wasn't a good reason? Who benefits from that? Literally no one. It's only a reasonable idea because of the outbreak. The only people you see closing hospitals on purpose are vulture capitalists.

What evidence would that be? Do you have any reliable data on the number of people infected at beaches? So far the results of real world contact tracing aren't consistent with computerized models of virion distribution in open air.

you just exhibited the fallacy of equating a restaurant to a beach (or being outside). You are also using "exposure" in the most generic sense of "presence" within a distance. That's really not how it works.

Like I said there is absolutely no evidence that you could get infected while in an open environment, moreover plenty of evidence that being outside is greatly beneficial to health and well being.

Now I am asking you the same question you asked me: "why would a bureaucrat want to go out of their way to close a beach if there wasn't a good reason?"

The answer is simple as unpleasant, they don't understand what they are doing.

> In any case, why would a bureaucrat want to go out of their way to close hospitals if there wasn't a good reason? Who benefits from that?

Politicians benefit from that. The current situation is no different than "No one ever got fired for hiring IBM". In this case "hiring IBM" is a surrogate for doing whatever your voting base believes in. In blue states, the majority believes in shutting things down aggressively, so politicians do. In red states, the majority thinks we should keep things open, so politicians do.

Politicians by and large in this crisis aren't responding to what experts say, they are responding to their own self interest. This is super easy to spot by seeing what experts are saying or what evidence is raised that they summarily dismiss because it contradicts what their constituency desires.

Why are we talking about closed beaches? We were talking about people with symptoms of appendicitis who choose to stay away from the hospital that is very much open for such cases.

Closing the beaches is frankly idiotic, but postponing elective surgery isn't. It's not wise to go in for a breast enlargement when an epidemic is on the move. With an appendicitis, on the other hand, you don't have a choice.

If a surgery isn't needed to prevent serious permanent injury in the next few days, it's considered elective. Tumor removals, for example, are elective surgery and have generally not been allowed.

Maybe, but the article is doing the exact same thing with the flu, except probably even worse because we're not systematically testing people for the flu in the same way that we are Covid-19.

You don't need to systematically test people in order to assign their death as a flu death.

We have many different ways of counting deaths. We either count the people who had a test; or we count death certificates; or we do surveillance to see what respiratory illnesses are circulating and how many people are searching google for flu-like symptoms and how many people are attending primary care and ED for flu-like symptoms.

(and which ever method we pick, if we pick the same method for covid-19 we see many more deaths)

The whole point of the article is to argue that those flu deaths are "wildly inflated statistical estimates" and not real flu deaths in the same way that Covid-19 deaths - where we are systematically testing increasingly wide-ranging groups of people who are hospitalized or even just in care homes - are real Covid-19 deaths. That the only apples-to-apples comparison is not to statistically compensate for the lack of flu testing at all and only compare tested, confirmed cases.

It's obvious just from comparing the numbers in the article to the ones in the comment I'm replying to that lack of testing has a much, much bigger effect on confirmed flu numbers than confirmed Covid-19 ones - confirmed Covid-19 deaths are at 2/3 to 1/2 of excess deaths, whereas confirmed flu is at 1/4 to 1/8th of estimated flu deaths, and the flu estimate does more work to exclude unrelated deaths than just counting raw excess deaths would. The supposedly apples-to-apples comparisons in the article looks to be even less directly comparable than the apples-to-oranges one it's rejecting.

But note that this is not true at a regional level - many US states, for example, have official coronavirus deaths higher than the excess death.