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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   20570 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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A quick google overdose deaths topped 112k in 2023 an all-time record.

[...]

I believe an order of magnitude bigger problem than COVID.

Trying to put some actual numbers to this:

According to the NYT COVID data page, weekly COVID deaths in the past year have ranged from 490 (July 2-8) to 2,462 (Jan 7-13) or 0.9%-3.6% of all deaths. Of course, this is deaths from acute COVID, actual COVID deaths is somewhat higher than the official numbers, but hard to get good data on how much higher, so let's stick to these numbers. Also, going back further the numbers are a lot higher and less regular, I'm assuming the past year is a much better approximation of what to expect going forward than including any older data. (Also, I'm not seeing an official 2023 death count... looking I found this 2022 report published in May 2023 so it's probably just too early for finalized 2023 numbers.)

112k/52 = average 2,153 deaths/week from overdose deaths, doesn't seem hugely different from number of COVID deaths, although since overdose doses are mostly young and COVID deaths are mostly old, measuring in QALYs would likely paint a different picture... although if you're measuring QALYs, not trying to measure the impact of post-COVID conditions seems unfair, and I'm not sure how that would affect the conclusion.

There's also the obvious issue that COVID is practically unavoidable, although there's ways to reduce the impact (vaccination, antivirals, not getting old being healthier), while avoiding an overdose is straight forward: Don't Do Drugs(tm). Or, at least, that's the oversimplification in the popular conception of the two.

Yes when I say OD are an order of magnitude (or close to that) bigger issue it was adjusting for life expectancy loss.

Yeah, it's bad.

If you have a 3% chance of dying of an OD, and the average OD death shaves 50 years off a person's life, then easily 10% of life expectancy reduction is due to overdoses.

Someone might object that, when a junky finally ODs, society has not actually lost that much. Which is somewhat true. But that's only because of how much was already lost when a healthy person was gradually turned into a junky in the first place.

Let's consider the millions of people who are harmed (but not outright killed) by drug addiction. In terms of QALYs lost, drugs are one of the worst perils our society faces, possibly up there with heart disease and obesity.

A new war on drugs would save the equivalent of millions of lives.

A new war on drugs would save the equivalent of millions of lives.

If, really big if, it is effective.

Comparing the badness of various problems to COVID isn't a meaningful basis for a response because the response to COVID wasn't driven by how bad it is.

It's tempting though, isn't it?

"We spent 10 trillion for zero (or possibly negative) value during Covid. Surely we can spend 10 billion on my issue".

Also works for Afghanistan/Iraq wars.

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