From the article:
>there were 96% more diabetes-related deaths than experts predicted. For heart disease, the figure was 89%; for Alzheimer’s disease, it was 64%; and for stroke, it was 35%.
>As well as people not being able to get the necessary treatment due to hospitals being overloaded, the study authors also speculate that people may have stayed at home due to the virus despite experiencing worsening symptoms of another condition they may have had.
>They also believe that the pandemic’s effects on people’s mental health may have played a part.
>As Prof. Woolf notes: “We can’t forget about mental health. A number of people struggling with depression, addiction, and very difficult economic conditions caused by lockdowns may have become increasingly desperate, and some may have died by suicide. People addicted to opioids and other drugs may have overdosed.”
Had several bad scares that I didn’t go in that I really should have.
Finally had a bad enough scare that I went to ER. Apparently heart isn’t doing great, or heading in that direction. I was stable enough to go home. With strict instructs to get additional testing in day’s.
Yet I’m Having major problems getting access to a cardiologist due to everything.
So yea, i lucked out in getting stable right before things shut down. But having a seriously hard time getting any follow up care.
So at a certain point this shutdown will kill me. And I’m fairly young.
So I have to balance virus risk with the more likely death due to lack of care.
At least in my area, hospitals are nearly over-the-top in terms of separating people who have symptoms, going in for tearing, and those going in for anything else. Separate entrances, separate waiting areas, no visitors, multiple tests required prior to non emergency treatments, etc.
Of course, if you can't find a specialist at all, that is a very different story.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/health-53310007/they-paused-my...
Despite many trips to Er and doctors complaining of stroke symptoms.
A simple blood thinner resolved so many problems for me.
Turns out there’s a big range of clot sizes. From micro ones that have very brief problems, to the sort that kill you in minutes. Hospitals can only really catch them when they are about to kill you, or just after.
OK, I read this as two separate things that should not be described in the same "35%" statistic.
In the former, the virus caused hospital overload specifically due to rising cases of the virus, or virus-related exacerbation of underlying disease.
In the latter, people's perception of the threat of hospitals, which were hotbeds for the virus, caused them not to seek treatment in hospitals.
Case #1 is attributable to the virus. Case #2 is indirect, but I'd argue that those same people would have also been somewhat impacted given that A) it's possible the hospital they avoided was overloaded and B) it's possible the hospital they avoided was a hotbed where they could have contracted the virus. There's also that C) they could have received successful treatment, but how can we measure that? For (A) and (B), the outcome was still death.
I imagine that the people who chose to stay home are in a set where it wasn't obvious that staying home meant death. Thus, I think it was a good bet given what we know about coronavirus complications, spreadability, and virulence.
Maybe the author is forgetting that this is the reason people wanted to track excess deaths in the first place.
Nor can you assume that all of these deaths are simply undetected Covid-19 deaths. We simply don't know what percent of the 35% are caused by Covid-19 and what percent are caused by the lockdown and/or people being too scared to seek treatment. All we know is that there is an additional 35% in excess deaths.
Suicide is not responsible for any appreciable fraction of that 35%. The article doesn't mention suicide at all, and it would be so extraordinarily anomalous if suicides were suddenly on par with heart disease that that would be the only possible title of this article if they were.
Also, I already quoted it above. You said all of the things mentioned were comorbidities. They aren't.
Occam's Razor can help here. We know that there are treatments for these ailments that can help people. We know these treatments stopped due to lockdown and people being afraid to go to hospitals. We know this must, but implication, increase deaths from these ailments.
The alternative explanation is far more complex, actually it's of unbounded complexity because as far as I know there isn't any clear known mechanism of action that shows how this type of virus can cause all these different kinds of problems. Is there even a robust set of studies that show how this type of virus causes blood clots? As far as I know there is some evidence that blood thinners can help a bit with flu, sometimes, so it's not entirely implausible, but I think it's also unknown what exactly happens there and why. And people keep saying this virus is totally unlike flu so that similarity should maybe be discarded.
Are these the driving forces behind increased clots etc? Maybe not. Maybe its contributing equally with people staying at home, or maybe not at all. But the mechanistic reasons for the broad symptoms are there and they're relatively straightforward, driven by the ability of the virus to infect lots of different cells and the variability of the human immune system
[0]https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2020/07/what-is-known-ab...
- the virus can also cause death by exacerbating underlying health issues; the body’s immune system is weakened while fighting off the illness.
- the sudden emergence and rapid spread of the disease overwhelmed critical care units when the virus was at its peak, reducing the amount of care any individual patient could receive.
And the argument of "35% excess deaths not caused by COVID-19" is perhaps technically correct due to the reasons above, however, those are indirect deaths that had the root cause of SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus. Notice the difference between COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2? The former is the disease, the latter is the virus.
As Dr. Mike Hansen said in a few of his autopsy report review videos he made in his YouTube channel[1], there are very few direct cause of death in the death certificate he signed and issued for his ICU patients, most related to blood clots and lack of oxygen but the common indirect cause is the SARS-CoV-2. In other words, if it weren't for the coronavirus infection, these deaths could either be prevented or delayed.
So I think it's more nuanced than simply saying we are attributing 35% the excess deaths to COVID-19 whereas these are indirectly caused by SAR-CoV-2 viral outbreak.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6h8TIxeg1g