Somehow even 12 months into the pandemic, people are saying "yes but how many of those 100k UK deaths were due to Covid and how many were due to lockdowns?" Time for a (short!) thread:
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1)
@PHE_uk tracks deaths by underlying cause https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/static-reports/mortality-surveillance/excess-mortality-in-england-latest.html … As of Jan 8, 82,180 deaths in England named Covid-19 on death certificate. Of these, C-19 was *underlying cause* in 74,000, or 90%. These aren’t people who tested positive, recovered and then fell down stairs.32 replies 176 retweets 1,083 likesShow this thread -
2) We also have data from
@ICNARC suggesting that deaths from many other causes are actually *down* this year. ICU admissions for trauma and even self-harm are lower this year than usual.pic.twitter.com/nJ2ZwK4fdc
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3) It is likely that lockdowns will have caused additional deaths in some poorer countries where people are tipped into extreme poverty, but in Peru the early data show deaths lower than usual for homicide, suicide & accidental deaths, especially for women https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091743520303625 …pic.twitter.com/HB92hXHwto
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4) It’s absolutely possible that lockdowns have caused deaths in some places, but in most countries where this kind of analysis has been done, non-Covid deaths have fallen relative to normal levels during lockdowns. That’s especially true for developed countries like the UK.
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Replying to @jburnmurdoch
I would add one consideration, which is that it was never likely that lockdowns would cause an enormous number of deaths in the short term. That idea was a very silly speculation proposed by lockdown opponents, not a realistic immediate outcome to expect
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Replying to @GidMK @jburnmurdoch
Imo the expected negative outcomes from lockdown were always on the scale of years or even decades (i.e. slowdowns in vaccine programs in some places, poverty, missed medical appointments etc) rather than the giant wave of deaths that some espoused
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Replying to @GidMK
Yep agreed. Plus the mental health burden, which may not even show up as years of life lost, but is absolutely real and may show up in other ways.
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Replying to @jburnmurdoch
Definitely. It always frustrated me that people assumed any decline in mental health would immediately show up in suicide numbers, rather than engaging with the complexity of both mental health and suicide
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Replying to @GidMK
Absolutely. With mental health, some issues may show up more as a subtle shift in e.g educational or career trajectory. There may be no impact in terms of QALYs at all, but still a very real issue. That deaths are the only unit used for so many Covid arguments is hugely limiting
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Agreed. Like that ridiculous Jama open paper about school closures - you can make these arguments without absurd leaps to try and link it all back to YLL/QALYs!
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Replying to @GidMK @jburnmurdoch
And, although I appreciate this is even harder to quantify, has to be measured against the mental health impacts in the counterfactual situation where the ‘lockdowns’ hadn’t been imposed and the epidemic had been left to continue to grow
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