By the start of the Summer the UK had around 60,000 excess deaths above the five year median - which included at least one fairly severe flu season.

Later in the Summer when lockdown was still in place and/or infection rates were still very controlled, the number of excess deaths dipped slightly below the median - as you would expect it to, given that people weren't commuting and there were far fewer road accidents.

The figures also disprove the usual talking point that other deaths had increased dramatically because hospital care and chronic medical attention were hard to access. There were certainly some extra deaths, but not on the scale of COVID itself.

Unless you're going to claim that some other lethal illness was stalking the land and no one had noticed, COVID is the only remotely plausible explanation for those excess deaths.

I personally know someone whose father likely died due to being unable to access health care in a timely fashion, as well as someone else who died of cancer after their chemotherapy was postponed. And I also know of two suicides in my extended social group in the past few months. It's tough to pin specific blame on lockdown for things like that. But it's certainly plausible that deaths like that would lead to excess deaths.

In the UK specifically the health authorities were estimating in late July that around 21,000 people had died due to lack of access to health care during lockdown: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/29/lockdown-has-kil...

In the US there are a lot of concerns that dementia patients in particular are dying due to the isolation caused by lockdown measures: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/09/16/coronavirus...

Sure, but we can look at when the excess deaths happened. Instead of being evenly distributed across the lockdown period, or peaking towards the end when people had longer without access to support, they came exactly when you'd expect deaths from an epidemic wave to peak before plummeting to normal levels towards the end of the lockdown period. Undoubtedly, individual deaths have resulted from lockdown, but the pattern of excess deaths matches COVID rather than lockdown being behind the aggregate increase.

Again, this isn't idle speculation: genuine mainstream health authorities believe lockdown has killed significant numbers of people. This is not a controversial position.

No, the question is why does the excess deaths distribution perfectly align with the expected and recorded COVID death spike and drop so sharply afterwards when lockdown was still in place.

It's uncontroversial that lockdown has killed and saved significant numbers of people for reasons other than COVID, but similarly it is entirely uncontroversial that the aggregate increase in excess deaths was caused by COVID. The idea that the inflection point COVID-time-to-death days after the start of lockdown is better explained by unannounced changes in policy or your personal advice to friends and family, on the other hand is about as scientifically credible as blaming 5G.

For example, around 40% of Wellington ICU patients are typically from elective procedures and around 10% of all Wellington ICU patients die.

Without lockdowns these people would probably not have been able to access health care either, because of, well, the pandemic.

Lockdowns have certainly created a death toll, that is by now mainstream consensus. The debate is about whether it's most of the excess death or only a large chunk of it.

But it's worth remembering that even then excess death numbers are low in absolute terms. A lot of people can't see that because for some reason it's standard for statistical agencies to only give a few years of data in convenient graphs on their websites, but older data is there, and it puts things in proportion. In the UK for example, which has one of the worst excess death rates in Europe, 2020 is so far a bit less deadly than 1999/2000 and the gap is widening [1]. But nothing remarkable happened in the UK in 1999/2000, nobody talks with sadness about those who were lost at the millennium. Nobody noticed anything at all. The idea that we've had some sort of terribly high or remarkable levels of excess death isn't the case: it's being noticed because people were told to expect enormous levels so started tracking the data with a microscope, and then it went up partly due to lockdowns.

In many other countries excess death is even less remarkable than that. Germany and Switzerland have seen years no different to the previous years for example. Cumulative death in Switzerland for 2020 is by now completely average, for example. There was no plague in Switzerland at any point.

[1] http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/

They did ration healthcare. This was the object of multiple news articles last week: https://time.com/5899432/sweden-coronovirus-disaster/ «the country’s hospitals were implementing a triage system» The triaging was so severe that «Only 13% of the elderly residents who died with COVID-19 during the spring received hospital care» Get your facts right.

«Lockdowns have certainly created a death toll, that is by now mainstream consensus. The debate is about whether it's most of the excess death or only a large chunk of it.»

This is laughably inaccurate. On the contrary, lockdowns are largely credited for overall having averted cases and deaths. I maintain a list of peer-reviewed studies (and some preprints) on the subject, and the vast majority agree: https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1307723024523616257 There isn't a single peer-reviewed study that suggests lockdowns are responsible for a "large chunk" of excess deaths. You are victim of misinformation.

Your comparison to 1999/2000 flu death is invalid: there were delays in reporting deaths that caused many deaths to be reported on the week after Xmas, hence the artificially high peak of that week of 2000. If you compare monthly excess deaths (to smooth artificial peaks) you will see covid excess deaths in April 2020 surpass flu excess deaths of January 2000.

And yet, this comparison would still miss the point: covid is such a serious disease that despite (effective) lockdowns, it still managed to kill more than he most severe flu seasons of the last 20+ years. That alone should make you stop and think...

There is in fact a government report that found «in comparison with the deaths due to influenza and pneumonia occurring in the year to 31 August 2020, deaths due to COVID-19 have been higher than every year monthly data are available (1959 to 2020).» https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

Germany and Switzerland have implemented particularly effective lockdowns, hence little to no excess deaths.

You're seeing what you want to see. It is normal for elderly patients in nursing homes to die without being in a hospital. You're claiming that Swedish hospitals were so overloaded they turned away patients they would normally have seen, but there is no evidence of that and the paper TIME cited as support actually doesn't give any. Rather, it says:

"Swedish ICU use rates remained lower than predicted, but a large fraction of deaths occurred in non-ICU patients. This suggests that patient prognosis was considered in ICU admission, reducing healthcare load at a cost of decreased survival in patients not admitted."

The latter sentence doesn't follow logically from the first in any way. They are assuming that all COVID patients should have ended up in ICU and if they didn't, that can only be due to evil doctors turning them away at the door despite having spare beds (which Sweden always did have). That is an absurd assumption, unsupported by any direct evidence, which is why they have to rely on invalid statistical inferencing.

What happened is that PCR testing labelled a whole lot of people who were about to die anyway as "COVID deaths". COVID symptoms are so mild in virtually all cases that many patients will have simply got a little bit sick but not enough to rush them to hospital, which can at any rate be quite dangerous for the very elderly and frail, and then they died. Was it COVID that pushed them over the edge? Was it just old age? Who can really say when it gets right to the edge of a life - something has to give.

lockdowns are largely credited for overall having averted cases and deaths

By the people who recommended them in the first place. Many other people without obvious conflicts of interest have looked at this and concluded the opposite.

There isn't a single peer-reviewed study that suggests lockdowns are responsible for a "large chunk" of excess deaths. You are victim of misinformation.

The UK Government's own reports say otherwise. In fact here's an article on the BBC today: "Between March and September 2020, there were 24,387 more deaths in England than expected in private homes, and 1,644 in Wales. The large majority did not involve COVID-19."

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54598728

Lockdowns have obviously killed people in the UK. Hospital admissions halved at the start, do you really think that would have had no impact on mortality? There is now a massive cancer backlog. The death toll of COVID is a handful of people per day in the UK, but the death toll from telling people to avoid hospitals during 2020 is going to be racking up for years, perhaps decades.

Why do lockdown supporters so often believe other people are the victims of misinformation? I've read a lot of papers coming out of epidemiology and the academic research establishments this year, many of them are atrocious. They mis-use logic and statistics every third paragraph, scientists mis-represent their own papers in press releases, their code sometimes just doesn't work. The standards in academia are incredibly low and they pump out "misinformation" at a shocking rate. If you simply believe peer reviewed studies without double checking them, you're the one being misled, not me.

Germany and Switzerland have implemented particularly effective lockdowns, hence little to no excess deaths.

I live in Switzerland. It had a rather mild lockdown, quite incomparable to many other countries thank god. It's astonishing you believe these were "particularly effective". But if you get your information from TIME, well, it's less of a surprise.

As an extreme example, for some poorer countries without much healthcare infrastructure, you can definitely make the case that given the inevitability of the virus spreading, in some situations the right thing to do is give up early, accept that you'll have a wave of deaths, and move on. The alternative is a slow motion disaster with about as many direct COVID deaths, and additional deaths due to lockdown. If you don't have healthcare infrastructure to begin with, overloading it doesn't change much.

This new virus spread far and fast, while seasonal flu is significantly more blocked off by how many people have immunity or vaccines. Number of deaths is lower for seasonal flu because the number who get infected by those known viruses is also much lower. That's why the IFR is close yet for this year more people are dying.

Observing that mortality is above median doesn’t prove that the virus is the cause of those excess deaths (e.g. we know that there were a lot of unreported heart attacks during a the same period), and it doesn‘t prove the specific claim that the IFR is 10x higher than the flu.

If you look at regions that were ineffective in handling the spread and had their hospital capacity overwhelmed, mortality jumps through the roof - I think it was higher than 10% in Lombardia before the lockdowns. And remember that hospitals can't work at anywhere close to 100% ICU occupancy for extended periods of time, so if the high inflow persists, mortality is likely to increase much more.

The vast difference between Covid19 and influenza is anyway plain to see if you look at ICU rates, even with all the lockdowns.

So even though your analysis sounds convincing at first read, it is a very bad interpretation of the data. The reality is that Covid19 is a much worse disease than Influenza, and that drastic measures are required to keep it under control (barely).

Early on, people with low blood oxygen were put on ventilators quickly, which both took a great toll on the system, and didn't help (or even made things worse).

If you look at the graphs now (I looked at 30 countries just an hour ago), you'll see that many countries in Europe have a very visible "second wave", including Denmark, Austria, the UK, France, Spain and even Sweden - but almost no deaths; and unlike the first wave, despite more people diagnosed with SARS-COV-2, much less people need treatment, and there is no lack of beds anywhere (although there is a lot of fatigue, which is a more complicated discussion).

Given you know what to do, such as prawning, vitamin D, and more (and more importantly - what not to do - no early ventilation, for example) - then, we no longer have hospital ICUs stuffed full of people with COVID19 either.

A lot has changed since April, but when I look at arguments, some sides still hold the data from early April (assuming up to 5% IFR, and the Ferguson predictions), while some do not acknowledge that April happened and only look at the stats in Aug-Sep. Not surprisingly, such arguments aren't really converging and each side tends to assume the other side is an idiot or insane.

I don't know about that. Everything you say is reasonable and not at all an example of the effect I was talking about.

It's totally fine to say "hey it looks like the CFR/IFR is declining because we have better treatment methods". This is a good-faith point, backed up by some easily observable data, and something that can evolve into a discussion about how to effectively manage the disease. It's not a point that I've heard any rational person object to.

It is worth noting though – the UK, as an example, currently already has about 30% of the cases in hospital versus the peak in late April, and about 15% of the deaths. This is much better, but those numbers are increasing pretty rapidly and without careful management risks getting out of control.

It's a claim not many are making because it's not clear it's really true.

Firstly, the bulk of the falling IFR is due to more widespread testing driving up numbers of known infections and sero-surveys indicating that even more people than that may have been infected. It's not primarily driven by better survival rates, although they did get better.

At this point it seems clear that mass ventilation was a mistake. It was actually killing people rather than saving them because it's a last-ditch resort. COVID wasn't actually deadly enough to justify this and the large scale usage was driven more by the lack of reliable information, the somewhat unusual form of presenting pneumonia in early patients, the belief that it was an extremely deadly virus and the fact that ventilators force all air coming out of the patients lungs through high quality filters, so doctors are trained that ventilation stops infected patients pumping virus into hospitals.

But doctors are smart and pretty quickly figured out that the ventilation was making things worse, that they couldn't keep the hospitals virus-free anyway, and at any rate they were about to run out of the machines so their hands were forced and they had to try something new. After that usage of ventilation went back to more normal policies, with supplemental oxygen being deemed sufficient for even quite extreme cases, because of course almost all cases need little or no hospital treatment.

Meanwhile many drugs were tried and some were hailed as drugs that could help, e.g. remdesivir or hydroxychloroquine. But later on more controlled studies done under calmer conditions concluded they actually seemed to have no effect.

Given this progress of events it's hard to argue that treatment methods actually got better, except in a very technical sense that most people wouldn't really mean. They got better in the sense that they returned to normal for this kind of virus and stopped making the situation worse. If there had been no mass panic at the start it's likely treatments would never have got so extreme to start with.

the UK, as an example, currently already has about 30% of the cases in hospital versus the peak in late April, and about 15% of the deaths

The UK has also quadrupled its testing rate since April. The numbers aren't directly comparable.

without careful management it risks getting out of control

I don't believe that's been proven at all. The analysis was done many times by now: every government intervention tried so far has no correlation with the course of the disease. That means attempts at management have failed and it has in fact been out of control the whole time, but, fortunately for us, our bodies are generally pretty good at fighting diseases except in the last years of our lives or when immunocompromised in some way, so that hasn't led to disaster.

In March, you needed multiple symptoms to get a test, which meant that conditional on having a test, your illness was much more serious.

Because this isn't an issue right now, it looks like the mortality rates have dropped when it's more likely that we are capturing a larger proportion of mild cases.

Sweden’s death graph totally looks like “inventory of likely-to-die people exhausted”, regardless of testing (they have not changed recommendations or actions).

Israel had no first wave in April (it had a blip, which turns out was essentially limited to ultra orthodox religious which are about 15% of the population).

In September, the official 2nd wave but really 1st wave struck the entire population - and testing capacity was already high (about 0.7% of the population tested daily). And the stats looked way too similar to other countries’ first wave.

The US is a weakly connected network of hundreds of different repositories, which makes it really hard to observe similar processes - they are not visible on aggregate.

1) Covid19 is far more deadly, look at all these excess deaths!

2) The IFR is low, about the same as the seasonal flu, so we really didn't need the lockdowns.

Both are half true.

Basically, we have decent herd immunity for existing viruses. Even with an identical IFR, the viruses are acting differently because we lack(ed) any real herd immunity for the new virus - so everyone was getting infected at once, which means everyone getting sick at once and risking overwhelming hospitals (this is the part people in camp 2 miss). On the flip side, because we do have decent herd immunity with existing viruses, either due to prior exposure or vaccine, seasonal flu doesn't spread nearly as far (this is the part people in camp 1 miss). A lot less people getting infected means a lot less people getting sick or dying, which explains the excess death despite the same IFR.

Seasonal flu has also much different spreading. You are spreading it for very short time and then you get clearly sick. Which makes limiting speed much easier.

People in camp (2) don't miss the risk of overwhelmed hospitals. We remember that we were constantly told they were about to be overwhelmed back in April and they never were. Sweden has the lowest ICU capacity in Europe by far, yet never had overwhelmed hospitals despite very visibly turning its back on the policies supposedly required to avoid it. How can this be reconciled with there being genuine risk?

It's apparent when you look at what happened back then that there was no actual risk of anything except running out of ventilators, a problem that was in turn caused by the panic - doctors were told this was a very deadly disease so were putting people on ventilators unnecessarily, partly because ventilation ensures all the air a patient breathes out is filtered, so they thought it was a way to keep hospitals clean. Once doctors realised ventilation was doing more harm than good and the age skews of the patients started to become publicly known, they backed off the ventilator use and there was never any shortage, of either ventilators nor beds.

Who/where is we, here? Because that's absolutely not true for many countries, where seasonal flu is routinely reported by the press as creating overloaded hospitals. Here are some examples:

https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20190205/bad-...

"Bad flu seasons test US hospitals: Hospitals in the United States have implemented new policies based on last year’s severe influenza season, but infectious disease experts agree that America’s health care systems would still be seriously challenged by another bad influenza season."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nhs-winter-p...

"NHS winter pressure: Hospitals report 99 per cent capacity over festive period as flu season looms"

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5279685/Californi...

"Flu drives hospitals into 'war zone' conditions: Tents on the street in California, 'state of emergency' in Alabama, and Boston is using GATORADE to plug shortage of IV drips"

https://www.thelocal.fr/20170111/french-hospitals-stretched-...

"Hospitals in France at breaking point as flu epidemic spreads"

etc. Reports like this are common across the world. Partly it's that the press like reporting crisis stories and in any large medical system they can always find health workers willing to give them dramatic quotes. Partly it's that surge capacity is always inherently limited.

every single post mentioning COVID is full of these shallow armchair analyses that seem to think rejecting all prevailing wisdom is an inherent good

I've not seen anyone claim that rejecting all prevailing wisdom is inherently good. That seems like a strawman. The posts arguing about COVID aren't rejecting panic just for the sake of it, they're arguing about it because they disagree that the severity of the problem supports the consequent social policies.

HN is also full of people posting comments decrying the awful people who double check what government officials are claiming against data, facts and logic. Those are equally aggravating to those of us who don't see a problem with critical thinking: especially when the "prevailing wisdom" is a subjective assessment of who thinks what. One that's being seriously distorted by media hype and censorship, to boot. The "wisdom" many governments are listening to is sadly very far from wise.

> CDC estimates that the burden of illness during the 2018–2019 season included an estimated 35.5 million people getting sick with influenza, 16.5 million people going to a health care provider for their illness, 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths from influenza

Covid19 has killed ~220,000 people so far in 2020 in the US.

From the same article you quoted about the epidemic in California (from 2018, mid-January):

> This year's outbreak is on track to becoming one of the worst flu seasons in recent history due to a deadly strand that has so far killed 85 adults and 20 children nationwide as the numbers continue to climb.

Covid19 has killed ~16,000 people so far in 2020 in California.

Related to the UK 2017-18 flu season that saw hospitals stretched ( https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/18/flu-outbreak... ):

> After 35 more deaths last week, 120 people across the country have died of flu-related symptoms since early October, compared with 45 in the same period in 2016-17.

Covid19 has killed ~43,000 people in the UK so far in 2020.

For the France 2016-2017 flu epidemic ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321906828_Influenza... ):

> During the epidemic wave, a marked excess mortality estimate at 14,400 deaths attributable to influenza was observed.

Covid19 has killed ~34,000 people in France in 2020 so far.

Point being, perhaps it is the old news that were a bit exaggerated; either way, Covid19 is measurably worse than then any recent flu, and this is after extreme lockdown measures compared to any flu pandemic in living memory.

Note: I am fully aware that some of the lower numbers are partial numbers from about the middle of the flu season. Feel free to look up the final numbers for that season as well - they will be at worst half the Covid19 numbers.

1. That isn't the point that was being made. Matthew McCleod argued that "we don't regularly have ICUs stuffed full of people with influenza", and that HN is full of people who reject the "prevailing wisdom" just for the sake of it. Neither is the case, and my post provides plenty of evidence to reject the belief about hospitals (which is driven by media stories not actual overload - in the UK hospitals are being reported as about to overflow although they have normal load for this time of year, i.e. the reports are misleading).

2. Your data is comparing apples and oranges. Nowhere has ever made the kind of testing effort being made for COVID. We really have no idea how many people catch or die from flu because it's not really tracked to the same level of effort. Meanwhile COVID reporting has been hopelessly inflated by a medical establishment that takes every option to increase reported numbers. People are "COVID hospitalisations" if they're admitted with a broken arm and happen to test positive even though they don't seem to be sick, they are "COVID deaths" if they get shot and test positive at time of death. They have "COVID" the disease even if no doctor ever diagnosed them based purely on fragments of RNA found in a blood sample, using a test with unknown and it seems wildly varying false positive rates, that's been ramped up well beyond the max sensitivity many PCR experts actually recommend.

Reported COVID numbers really can't be compared numerically to anything historical at this point. They are "meaningful" only when compared against each other and even then there are difficulties as countries report things differently. For instance the numbers were inflated in the UK by at least 5000 deaths because the health agency defined COVID as a terminal disease. Once you tested positive, for the rest of your life your death would be marked a COVID death regardless of how much later you died or what of. They "fixed" this by changing forever to 28 days, which is still not a valid way to measure who died of what. That's how you get the New York Times reporting a list of people who died of COVID in which the sixth person on the list was a homicide victim.

Fundamentally, if you look at excess death numbers in a lot of countries, they look like flu season. Reported IFRs have continuously fallen and even the establishment figures are now in range of a strong flu season, not anything more. That's why people keep comparing it to flu.

You debunked nothing. All the per age IFR comparisons of flu vs covid I had seen has covid killing more people for 30 years old too.