https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/8d7f-Drug-Alert30Jan2021.pdf
Overdose deaths are so high that Toronto Public Health is telling drug users to violate lockdown, for safety:
"Try not to use alone. Use with someone else and take turns spotting for each other.Wear a mask and stay 6 feet away from people you are using with to avoid passing the virus. A buddy system is safer than using alone"
Lockdowns kill.
@pete in that specific case the cause of death is drug OD. Making such shortcuts is dangerous. Don't blame lockdown for everything.
@stevenroose @roshii @pete funnily enough this exact difficulty has been a topic for heated debate wrt. which covid deaths are "real" and which caused by comorbidities.
@kekcoin @stevenroose @pete we will never know unless we run a double blind studies with large group of people, but that will surely never happen since it would imply purposely infecting a group 🤫
@roshii @kekcoin @pete I think long-term large-number statistics can help a lot. Like a countries average annual deaths of certain comorbidities can be used as a baseline to estimate covid-caused deaths.
People also try to do this on a global level with just counting excess deaths from the average for all causes, but I think looking at certain medical conditions gives way better results.
On a global level there's many deaths that have been prevented by covid as well. Cuz no traffic and no work..
@stevenroose @roshii @kekcoin Though that's hard because lockdown causes deaths to increase too. Eg heart disease: people were concerned that covid was causing heart attacks etc. But now it's looking much more likely that the reason for the increase is a combination of people getting care later, and hospitals taking care of people less effectively.
Even something as simple as taking 60 more seconds to respond b/c of safety gear kills more people.
@pete @stevenroose @kekcoin there is indeed too many factors in play to infer anything from available data. again, without a reference data set there is nothing to compare against.
lockdown is surely a factor of some death, but only a factor, not an actor. this is no direct action-reaction relationship