Re:London may have gone into a Covid-accelerated decline
by TeMPOraL on Sunday May 24, 2020 @06:59AM
(#23290699)
You may be confusing this with excess deaths count, which is tracking the difference between deaths in a given month of 2020 and deaths in the same month in previous year (or years, averaged). Assuming no other unknown disease or phenomenon other than COVID-19 is silently ravaging our societies, this is the most reliable metric we have - as government after government has been caught on underreporting COVID-19 deaths.
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Re:London may have gone into a Covid-accelerated decline
by thu2111 on Sunday May 24, 2020 @08:34AM
(#23291066)
But that's clearly a false assumption. It assumes hospitals can be emptied and society put under house arrest with no excess deaths as a consequence, which is not only a very strange assumption but contradicted by huge amounts of evidence.
There's by now a whole lot of people, including many experts in many domains, who are concluding the lockdown will kill more people than the disease itself. Far more if it turns out they had little impact, which there is also quite some evidence of.
Re:London may have gone into a Covid-accelerated decline
by TeMPOraL on Sunday May 24, 2020 @08:37AM
(#23291083)
You can filter out deaths by suicide and similar, of which there isn't many so far (but yes, maybe the lockdown will kill more; it hasn't now). You kind of already have to filter out things like deaths by traffic accidents, of which there's much less now.
Re:London may have gone into a Covid-accelerated decline
by guscost on Sunday May 24, 2020 @01:51PM
(#23293204)
Only 8% fewer traffic deaths in March: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
And consider that heart attack and stroke centers are seeing precipitous drops in patient referrals, almost certainly meaning that the fear of catching COVID-19 is causing many people to avoid treatment and die at home: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/patients-with-heart-at...