I was challenged on Twitter by a member of the anti-mask brigade to refute data posted online by “The Ethical Skeptic” that our deaths are now mostly from the lockdown. I couldn’t discuss the question with Ethical Skeptic as he (they? see below) had blocked me after I criticized one of his earlier productions.
On principle, I will not link to ES’s website, but you can Google for it. It’s a popular, very slick and attractive Word Press site. The particular graph I was asked about is copied is here. This production, which must have taken hours, is only one of twenty-one on that page alone.
Let’s begin at the beginning, the number of heart attacks. Alas, the URL in footnote number 1 which is supposed to give us the number of heart attacks in excess this year is to the wrong site. It’s the 2014–2018 records. See for yourself. Note that his footnote incorrectly says this site is “Weekly Count of Deaths By State & Select Causes, 2014-2020.” What’s a little citation fraud between friends?
Perhaps ES was using this site, the preliminary numbers for 2019–20. Duplicating the analysis he should have done, we find his numbers for disease are too low! Not only do we have the brand new deaths from COVID–19, we have significant increases in deaths of heart conditions and stroke this year, about 30,000 so far. (We also have a large increase in Alzheimers deaths, which is difficult to attribute to a virus.) Those are still dwarfed by the 180,000 diagnosed COVID–19 deaths, and often included undiagnosed COVID–19 causing a heart attack, back in March, April, and May when the health system of the Northeast USA was over capacity. The 2020 heart attack deaths exceed the baseline mostly during the COVID–19 spike (see graph). Nothing suggests an ongoing problem with heart attacks from the lockdown, as opposed to the virus.
It’s at this point that ES really goes off the rails. He just randomly assumes that suicide deaths will be half those of the Great Depression. No sign of that. His estimates for alcohol abuse are also an argumentum ex culo. Nor has ES made any attempt to separate the increase in despair from the lockdown from the increase caused by the economic contraction that would occur even without a lockdown because of death and illness.
Strangest of all is a claim that every fatal delay in cancer diagnosis (cancer deaths are down a tiny amount so far this year) will cost twenty years of life (that’s the meaning of the small 20 over the Cancer circle). The chances that a person whose cancer that becomes incurable from a few month’s delay in detection would have had twenty years to live with earlier detection is small. Which side is fear-mongering again?
The anti-maskers have one dilemma, which is that every damn week 7000 more Americans die than died in past years. This is just one more attempt to hide it. I have serious questions about The Ethical Skeptic “him”self—my impression is of a sophisticated disinformation site maintained by far more than one person—but I’ll save the non-technical analysis for another diary.