Read this on Hackernews this morning
10 year trend of excess mortality used by insurance companies
Swiss Re Ltd is a Swiss reinsurance company founded in 1863 and headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland.
It is one of the world’s largest reinsurers, as measured by gross premiums written.
Is it really linked to the pandemic though? I don’t mean to be conspiratorial, I’ll happily believe it if someone can explain, but frankly the pandemic seems to me like a very small drop in a huge bucket of problems the world has that would exacerbate mortality.
Some factors I would easily think have much more impact than covid would be higher wealth inequality leading to widespread poverty, higher crime, vaccine and more general healthcare hesitancy, crumbling public services and rising cost of private alternatives, increased homelessness and stress caused by housing insecurity due to extremely high costs and jobs being few and far between while low paid and highly insecure as layoffs never seem to end and good luck finding one of you’re not already working, and all that at least intuitively to me can far more easily kill people than a virus with flu symptoms that largely stopped 5 years ago.
Obviously way back during the pandemic it’s understandable there were some excess deaths directly caused by the virus for people who were already one foot there who also ended up getting the virus, but in retrospect the whole thing wasn’t even that big a deal, sat at home for like a month in April and that was it, most people either didn’t have it at all or didn’t even know they had it, and seemed to enjoy the excitement and the change of pace to working from home and the accompanying lower transport cost, now how would this fairly benign event still cause much of anything, let alone excess mortality?
7 million of 6 billion could indeed be considered a “drop in the bucket” on the grand scale, a “blip on the graph” but that’s not your point it seems.
Covid and its continued impact on the world being reduced to “being sat at home a month in April” is such a dismissive and deluded perspective, I don’t even understand how it works as a comment literally on a data driven study about continued heightened mortality due to covid.
But what I couldn’t find in this study is WHY they think this increase in mortality is due to covid.
I am not claiming they are wrong. I am not casting doubt. I am not anyone or in any position to do that.
I am simply missing an explanation, an explanation that I feel should be front and centre, in bold red text, maybe wordart, for how something relatively minor from 5 years ago is causing anything at all 5 years later. I may be wrong but I think that’s called a thesis, and either I’m blind or I couldn’t find it.
To me, yes it is very unintuitive because the pandemic is grossly outdone by virtually everything that’s happened since and during. If there is an increase in insert bad thing here, a fairly benign virus from 5 years ago wouldn’t even be in my top 10 guesses for it.
And yes, maybe I’m very deluded, but if you can’t explain it to an idiot like me who’s trying to understand and genuinely align themselves with truth and knowledge derived via the scientific method, then what hope is there for communicating this stuff to the rest of society to benefit from, when many aren’t so willing, and would happily equate data driven analysis and findings with the subjective opinion of their uncle that he obtained through “doing his own research”?
