Manic of a panic is geopolitical

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by VBCurtis

Good one! When folks are discussing "suicide plus OD deaths", you note only that we're not at the top of suicide deaths. Did you check where we are for OD deaths?

I didn't check rankings for OD's. I did check numbers of OD deaths in the US, which were higher than suicides, but was unsure about how many OD's were also suicides. The number of OD deaths I get for the US from the table you linked to (245.8 deaths per million times 327 million) is a bit higher than the 2018 figures I had looked up, but I'm not sure what year the table is for. The article refers to 2016 in the past tense, and the page was last updated in 2018. So I'm guessing 2016 or 2017.

But yes, OD's are currently killing more people in the US than suicides.

What the earlier post claimed was that there would be more suicides and OD's in the US due to circumstances caused by anti-COVID-19 measures than COVID-19 deaths. Does that mean an increase over current figures?

The number of COVID-19 deaths in the US is currently around 54,000.

[Dr Sardonicus]

States see spike in poison control calls following Trump's comments on injecting disinfectant

Some poison control centers reported a spike in calls following President Trump's suggestion that injecting disinfectant might help people infected with coronavirus.
<snip>
In Maryland, the Emergency Management Agency received over 100 calls inquiring about the president's suggestion, forcing the service to issue an alert to remind citizens that "under no circumstances should any disinfectant product be administered into the body through injection, ingestion or any other route."
<snip>
More concerning, though, is the number of people who actually went ahead with the suggestion.

In New York City, the Daily News reported that the Poison Control Center saw 30 cases of "exposure to Lysol, bleach & other cleaners in 18 hours after Trump's suggestion" that cleaning products might be used to treat coronavirus. NYC Poison Control saw only 13 such cases in a similar period last year.

The story also notes a large increase to calls to poison-control centers since March, related to COVID-19 and pertaining to improper use of disinfectants.

It is heartening to see that a number of people had enough sense to call and check before doing as the Jabbernowl Jobbernowl Who Is God suggested.

[Uncwilly]

Here is a great bit of COVID comic relief. It is spot on.
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comme...meone_to_play/
It is about 3 minutes of video that is worth the watch.

[kriesel]

Instilling such things as surfactants and antibiotics directly into lungs, via an injection technique, is a documented animal research method. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3156004/
Inhalation works effectively for some drugs, such as nicotine or THC. Speaking as an engineer, not a trained medical person, fine aerosol as a delivery mechanism of drugs to diseased alveoli is an interesting approach, providing the aerosol generator does not use temperatures that damage the drug to be delivered or produce harmful byproducts, as slow combustion of tobacco or pot does. https://sunrisehouse.com/cause-effec...ugs-take-body/
It reaches deeper in the respiratory system than inhalers, snorting, or nasal sprays will. https://www.drugs.com/albuterol.html

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

It is heartening to see that a number of people had enough sense to call and check before doing

Yes. Closer to passing the old standard of parenting, "If someone told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?"
(Me: not even with a bungee jumping cord and a backup chute.)

[Till]

Originally Posted by kriesel

Estimates of suicides plus OD deaths added by substantial unemployment due to covid19 countermeasures outnumber the projected covid19 death total. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pande...-19-cordle-cfa

From that reference:

On April 20, University of Washington (Institute of Health Metrics) Professor Ali Mokdad said, “The United States is already past the “peak” in terms of daily covid-19-related deaths.” The IMHE modelers recently revised projected coronavirus-related deaths sharply downward, estimating 60,300 coronavirus-related deaths by early August.

According to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries, the US will be there in three days or so...

[kriesel]

Is maximizing duration of physical survival moral? At what cost to yourself or others? https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/23...irus-lockdowns

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

I didn't check rankings for OD's. I did check numbers of OD deaths in the US, which were higher than suicides, but was unsure about how many OD's were also suicides. The number of OD deaths I get for the US from the table you linked to (245.8 deaths per million times 327 million) is a bit higher than the 2018 figures I had looked up, but I'm not sure what year the table is for. The article refers to 2016 in the past tense, and the page was last updated in 2018. So I'm guessing 2016 or 2017.

Perhaps we should refer to the landmark 2015 "deaths of despair" study by Case & Deaton here - that is a review by The Guardian, here is a link is to their 2017 followup study for the Brookings Institution, Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century. The study uses strictly per-100,000-people statistics and further breaks them down by age cohort, which is useful, but makes it hard to get a "big picture" feel for total-annual-deaths-of-despair estimates. Wikipedia to the rescue:

The prevalence [of deaths of despair] increased markedly during the first decades of the 21st century, especially among middle-aged and older working class white Americans starting in 2010, followed by an increase in mortality for Hispanic Americans in 2011 and African Americans in 2014. It [sic] gained media attention because of its connection to the opioid epidemic. For 2018, some 158,000 U.S. citizens died from these causes, compared to 65,000 in 1995.

So roughly 100,000 such deaths per year in the U.S.

From the Comments & Discussion section at the end of the Brookings paper:

This paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton addresses one of the most important economic and demographic issues of our time: the rise of mortality among white non-Hispanics in the past 15 years. For some time, there has been scattered evidence that mortality rates have been increasing for certain groups of the population (Olshansky and others 2012; Meara, Richards, and Cutler 2008). Two years ago, in a widely cited paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Case and Deaton (2015) brought the data together, documenting the sys- tematic increase in mortality rates for white non-Hispanics since about the year 2000.

Their findings were shocking in two senses. First, mortality rates almost always decline over time. Between 1979 and 1999, for example, mortal- ity rates for whites age 45–54 declined by 1.7 percent annually. In con- trast, the mortality rates that Case and Deaton were looking at increased by 0.3 percent annually (this is for all whites, including Hispanics). Second, this pattern is dramatically different in the United States than in other rich countries. U.S. white non-Hispanics are becoming increasingly anomalous relative to their peers abroad.

A good deal of commentary was directed at these findings. Some discussions considered whether mortality rates were rising or were just flat (Gelman and Auerbach 2016). In the big picture, this is relatively immaterial— both historical trends and international comparisons lead one to expect declining mortality. Other discussions addressed whether the increase was largely confined to women, or was true for men as well (Achenbach and Keating 2016). The relative increase in mortality was greater for women than men, but both groups did poorly.

The bigger issue, however, is about why these trends are occurring and what can be done to reverse them. What is it about the economic, social, or medical landscape that is leading to higher mortality for a very large segment of the population?
Case and Deaton address these issues in their current paper. Relative to their earlier paper, the current paper extends the analysis for an additional two years. Not surprisingly, the trends noted in the earlier paper have continued. More importantly, however, Case and Deaton make a first pass at why they believe mortality is rising.

By cause of death, the two biggest factors in the mortality reversal are the slowing down in mortality reductions from heart disease and the increase in “deaths of despair”—deaths due to drug and alcohol abuse and suicide. In their earlier paper, Case and Deaton suggested that the ready availability of opioid drugs might have exacerbated the increased mortality, especially that resulting from accidental overdoses. In their current paper, their emphasis has changed a bit. Rather than emphasizing the supply of pills, they now focus on the social and economic circumstances that lead people to take them.

Their overall suggestion is very much in the tradition of Émile Durkheim (1897): People despair when their material and social circumstances are below what they had expected. This despair leads people to act in ways that significantly harm their health. This may have a direct impact on death through suicide, or an indirect impact through heavy drinking, smoking, drug abuse, or not taking preventive medications for conditions such as heart disease. At root is economic and social breakdown.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kriesel

Is maximizing duration of physical survival moral? At what cost to yourself or others? https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/23...irus-lockdowns

What is disheartening, on the other hand, is the intense poverty of moral vision that the response reveals. It takes for granted the moral irrelevance of work, study, human interaction, sightseeing, dating, going to the gym, attending sacred services, and all of the million and one things that the current restrictions have largely put on hold.

What a bunch of errant nonsense.

The moral value of normal activities that have been put on hold is certainly irrelevant to the virus.

And it's not a matter of "maximizing duration of physical survival." It's a matter of keeping things under some semblance of manageability so our entire health care system, to say nothing of the means of dealing with dead bodies, gets completely swamped.

In my book, it's not so much the restrictions that are blameworthy. It's the Admin's incompetent response -- or perhaps I should say failure to respond, essentially squandering two months of time in which we could have been preparing -- and in particular the lack of testing for COVID-19.

And, as to the restrictions hurting the "lower classes" disproportionately, a fair point as far as it goes. But it runs into Congress's efforts to use the COVID-19 relief efforts to help out the well-connected instead.

Jonathan Ashbach is a PhD student in politics at Hillsdale College.

And I'm sure a fair number of R-Senators and Reps read Imprimis.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

It's a matter of keeping things under some semblance of manageability so our entire health care system, to say nothing of the means of dealing with dead bodies, gets completely swamped...
And, as to the restrictions hurting the "lower classes" disproportionately, a fair point as far as it goes. But it runs into Congress's efforts to use the COVID-19 relief efforts

It's supposedly a matter of KEEPING THINGS FROM getting completely swamped. You know, the hospital ships that are not needed, temporary hospitals that were rushed into place and hardly used or not used at all, whole floors of existing hospitals emptied and closed, doctors and nurses furloughed, and reportedly some hospitals will close and not reopen, along with countless other businesses.

The combined economic output of the work force and capital is what supports the standard of living of a society, including necessities. Do less, have less. As one example, consider half a loaf in this old reference. http://www.fourwinds10.com/siterun_d...p?q=1212803067
https://modernsurvivalblog.com/preps...parently-gone/
Same emptying of reserves as pandemic response supplies, performed by previous administrations.

Meanwhile cancer patients and others go untreated, and some die.
Congress is being abused to press for wild damaging extravagant socialist programs as part of any actions toward Covid19 related matters. One bill, one purpose, is the way to go.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kriesel

Congress is being abused to press for wild damaging extravagant socialist programs as part of any actions toward Covid19 related matters.

The passive voice should never be used. (William Safire, Fumblerules)

Who, exactly, is "abusing" Congress?