9 ms·

Latest EURO MOMO data shows excess all-cause mortality in some countries

SiempreViernes 7y ago
Thanks, but we already know there is a pandemic going on causing excess mortality. In fact depending on where we are in the world we are at the tail end of a solid 3 week block where this pandemic and its effect on the local society was the only thing being reported on. Or in other words: these excess mortality numbers include Covid-19 deaths, it's not the sexy excess mortality that excludes the pandemic some media have reported on.
- KaiserPro 7y ago
  A lot of my dutch friends have been saying: "look! look! no excess mortality in the numbers" so this is pretty important.
  - wila 7y ago
    Let them have a look at [1] It shows a graph of the death rates for the past 3 years. This year is not a good year (to put it mildly) If they're Dutch, then they know what the RIVM stands for. For others reading this, you can probably compare it best to the Dutch version of the CDC. [1] https://www.rivm.nl/monitoring-sterftecijfers-nederland https://www.rivm.nl/monitoring-sterftecijfers-nederland
- thebruce87m 7y ago
  We didn’t know that it’s causing excess mortality, at least not from any data I’ve seen. It’s all been COVID related deaths which is pretty meaningless in its own. This is the important data that shows how bad it really is - albeit not normalised for the reduction in other deaths such as car crashes etc.
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago
    So have you read the stories about how hospitals rent cooling containers and some cities use ice rinks to get additional storage capacity for dead bodies and go "I wonder if there is any excess deaths going on"?
    - sojournerc 7y ago
      Those hot spots of mortality could like be offset by reduction of other causes of death in less affected areas. Just as a counter-point to excess mortality being obvious.
      - SiempreViernes 7y ago
        Uh, you have to provide a casual link between excess and suppression buddy, otherwise it's not a counterargument.
        sojournerc 7y ago
        My counter-point was only that it isn't _obvious_, as you stated.
    - DanBC 7y ago
      Have you read this thread where there are people still saying "covid-19 isn't that bad, it's about the same as a rough flu year"? Data helps persuade those people that this is worse than most flu years in recent history.
      - antpls 7y ago
        But would a 10% worse flu worth a global recession due to global lockdown ?
    - thebruce87m 7y ago
      Yes, I have. The counter argument to that is that all the people who were going to die this year just died in the same week. This would of course temporarily overwhelm mortuaries etc but would result in no excess mortality for the year. The infection rate numbers are essentially meaningless since governments are testing differently. Others don’t even have any tests at all. The death numbers are also meaningless unless you know they are truly extra deaths that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. Some countries are under-counting by only counting hospital deaths. Some countries are over-counting by counting any death with COVID as a COVID death. A death count in itself is meaningless without an expected death count which we almost never see. Now do I believe we have a real problem? Yes. Can I quantify it? No. Not without excess mortality data like this on an ongoing basis.
KaiserPro 7y ago
Being selfish and looking at the numbers for the UK. One thing that is striking is the peaks in age. The total figures look like the peak has yet to arrive, but thats because the mortality in the 65+ range is climbing (Given that 13% and rising have cases, this isn't suprising) but the 18-65 looks like it has peaked. This shows a similar pattern to spain, if a bit earlier on the slope. However this is just a shallow observation.
- rjsw 7y ago
  Maybe the over 65s in the UK can't isolate themselves as easily as younger age groups. Knowing percentages of older people in nursing homes for different countries could be useful.
  - christkv 7y ago
    It’s gotten into the old folks homes just as in Spain.
- DanBC 7y ago
  The Office for National Statistics is gathering lots of data for the England and Wales (but not NI or Scotland). (There's some lag in the ONS data). "The provisional number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 3 April 2020 (Week 14) was 16,387; this represents an increase of 5,246 deaths registered compared with the previous week (Week 13) and 6,082 more than the five-year average." https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19roundup/2020-03-26 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... "The @ONS said the 16,387 deaths registered in England and Wales in the week to 3 April, was the highest weekly total since they started recording weekly deaths in 2005" https://twitter.com/ShaunLintern/status/1249990956302073856?s=20 https://twitter.com/ShaunLintern/status/1249990956302073856?... If we look at the weekly death for 2020, compared to the weekly death averaged for the past 5 years we see large spikes in excess mortality. We'd expect some increase because the UK has an ageing population, but not this much. https://twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1249983121254203395?s=20 https://twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1249983121254203395?... Or we can look at max / min mortality for each week since 2010, and overlay covid-19 excess mortality https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1250007002165755905?s=20 https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1250007002165755905?s... We can include flu and pneumonia https://twitter.com/philjvtaylor/status/1250094624707928065?s=20 https://twitter.com/philjvtaylor/status/1250094624707928065?... "Of the deaths registered, 3,475 mentioned coronavirus, which is 21 per cent of all deaths, compared to 539 deaths and 4.8 per cent of all deaths in the previous week." https://nhsproviders.org/topics/covid-19/coronavirus-member-support/national-guidance/government-updates/daily-updates https://nhsproviders.org/topics/covid-19/coronavirus-member-... (I upvoted you. I don't understand why you got downvotes.)
s9w 7y ago
This isn't exactly a good rebuttal to "it's just the flu". But it's still important datapoint in itself.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  It's really just another data point. Using absolute numbers of deaths, it is hard to differentiate between an epidemic where R0 is moderate (say, 2.5) and the IFR is fairly high, or another where the R0 is higher (e.g. 6) and the IFR is lower. Both get you a lot of hospital load and an increased number of deaths. Some interesting studies coming out now supporting the iceberg theory. Depending on your perspective, that could be good news.
Leary 7y ago
So Germany, which is right next door to the Netherlands/France/Italy, is experiencing no excess mortality. What did they do right and how can we have some of that.
- sveme 7y ago
  We don‘t talk to our grandparents anymore.
- splitrocket 7y ago
  Listen to experts, have highly competent leadership, run a coordinated response. Incompetency kills.
  - mc32 7y ago
    I don’t think that explains the whole situation, or at least I don’t believe that all but Germany have incompetent leaders, have bad experts, and lack coördination.
  - 101404 7y ago
    Yep, that's the story the media here tells. Of course. "We are so exceptional, we Germans." In reality, we had just four times more ventilators available than any of the larger countries around us, so we never hit the "no treatment possible" situation.
    - zzzcpan 7y ago
      No, that can't be it. Ventilators is a last resort kind of measure, most people under ventilators die either way, so they can't affect numbers much. I suspect Germany is just testing more and earlier than others.
      - 101404 7y ago
        No idea where you got that information. Testing in Germany started very late, but was then increased rapidly. As of today, Germany has done 1,317,887 tests. The US: 3,029,979 tests, Italy: 1,073,689 tests. (Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/) So not exceptionally more than others.
jose_zap 7y ago
One interesting thing that I can see there is that the current excess for many countries seem to be no worse so far from a larger excess in the early weeks of 2017. Another very surprising thing is to see no excess mortality in Sweden, a country criticized for a laxer strategy against COVID-19. I was not expecting to see that.
- downerending 7y ago
  I leaned towards Doomer, especially early on, but must admit that looked at on the scale of years, it's possible that this will turn out to be a blip followed by a new normal of (say) a three-percent higher rate. One caveat is that over the long run, everyone dies exactly once. A more interesting stat will be life-expectancy (i.e., presumed years lost). But then again, most people dying aren't losing that many years of their life expectancy. (Apologies for being grim.)
  - cameldrv 7y ago
    Yes, but this is with everything locked down. The trick is going to be figuring out how to unlock without the doomer scenario occurring.
    - downerending 7y ago
      I meant that this is what I think might happen if/as lockdown is slowly released. There will be some trick in figuring out how slow is slow enough, and perhaps we'll go back and forth a bit, but this looks like what will happen. If we keep things locked down too long, immense numbers of people will die from that. We need to minimize all deaths, not just deaths from the virus.
      - antpls 7y ago
        > We need to minimize all deaths, not just deaths from the virus The recent events lead me to believe that it is not what countries are doing. Even WHO posted a figure in 2019 of 8 millions of deaths per year from Tabacco. The covid19 will not reach that level anytime soon, yet every country in the world accepted a major economy self-sacrifice to "save" people from covid19. How to explain that?
dominiclooser 7y ago
Is there anything in this data indicating that there is something going on more severe than the flu? I don't see anything.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  "It's not worse than the flu when we lockdown the entire global economy" is not a comforting fact, even if true.
  - dominiclooser 7y ago
    We don't know how it would have been without lockdown. We just see this data and it looks totally normal.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      > We don't know how it would have been without lockdown. Sure we do. It's not hard to see the curves flattening once mitigation efforts go into place, and slow-to-react countries having a harder time of it. https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ It also stands to reason that a respiratory virus would be affected by a country going on lockdown, given the mechanism.
- petschge 7y ago
  In data that are 2 days to 5 weeks old we see that it kills as many as a bad flue year despite massive efforts to contain it.
  - dominiclooser 7y ago
    As far as I know, Sweden didn't do much lockdown and is in normal range too. (At least so far). If it stays this way: If it would have been really that massive without measure, shouldn't Sweden be a huge outlier?
    - 7y ago
vogre 7y ago
It's good to see how healthy people in Luxembourg became with all this pandemic!

Thanks, but we already know there is a pandemic going on causing excess mortality. In fact depending on where we are in the world we are at the tail end of a solid 3 week block where this pandemic and its effect on the local society was the only thing being reported on. Or in other words: these excess mortality numbers include Covid-19 deaths, it's not the sexy excess mortality that excludes the pandemic some media have reported on.

KaiserPro 7y ago
A lot of my dutch friends have been saying: "look! look! no excess mortality in the numbers" so this is pretty important.
- wila 7y ago
  Let them have a look at [1] It shows a graph of the death rates for the past 3 years. This year is not a good year (to put it mildly) If they're Dutch, then they know what the RIVM stands for. For others reading this, you can probably compare it best to the Dutch version of the CDC. [1] https://www.rivm.nl/monitoring-sterftecijfers-nederland https://www.rivm.nl/monitoring-sterftecijfers-nederland
thebruce87m 7y ago
We didn’t know that it’s causing excess mortality, at least not from any data I’ve seen. It’s all been COVID related deaths which is pretty meaningless in its own. This is the important data that shows how bad it really is - albeit not normalised for the reduction in other deaths such as car crashes etc.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  So have you read the stories about how hospitals rent cooling containers and some cities use ice rinks to get additional storage capacity for dead bodies and go "I wonder if there is any excess deaths going on"?
  - sojournerc 7y ago
    Those hot spots of mortality could like be offset by reduction of other causes of death in less affected areas. Just as a counter-point to excess mortality being obvious.
    - SiempreViernes 7y ago
      Uh, you have to provide a casual link between excess and suppression buddy, otherwise it's not a counterargument.
      - sojournerc 7y ago
        My counter-point was only that it isn't _obvious_, as you stated.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    Have you read this thread where there are people still saying "covid-19 isn't that bad, it's about the same as a rough flu year"? Data helps persuade those people that this is worse than most flu years in recent history.
    - antpls 7y ago
      But would a 10% worse flu worth a global recession due to global lockdown ?
  - thebruce87m 7y ago
    Yes, I have. The counter argument to that is that all the people who were going to die this year just died in the same week. This would of course temporarily overwhelm mortuaries etc but would result in no excess mortality for the year. The infection rate numbers are essentially meaningless since governments are testing differently. Others don’t even have any tests at all. The death numbers are also meaningless unless you know they are truly extra deaths that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. Some countries are under-counting by only counting hospital deaths. Some countries are over-counting by counting any death with COVID as a COVID death. A death count in itself is meaningless without an expected death count which we almost never see. Now do I believe we have a real problem? Yes. Can I quantify it? No. Not without excess mortality data like this on an ongoing basis.

KaiserPro 7y ago

Being selfish and looking at the numbers for the UK. One thing that is striking is the peaks in age. The total figures look like the peak has yet to arrive, but thats because the mortality in the 65+ range is climbing (Given that 13% and rising have cases, this isn't suprising) but the 18-65 looks like it has peaked. This shows a similar pattern to spain, if a bit earlier on the slope. However this is just a shallow observation.

rjsw 7y ago
Maybe the over 65s in the UK can't isolate themselves as easily as younger age groups. Knowing percentages of older people in nursing homes for different countries could be useful.
- christkv 7y ago
  It’s gotten into the old folks homes just as in Spain.
DanBC 7y ago
The Office for National Statistics is gathering lots of data for the England and Wales (but not NI or Scotland). (There's some lag in the ONS data). "The provisional number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 3 April 2020 (Week 14) was 16,387; this represents an increase of 5,246 deaths registered compared with the previous week (Week 13) and 6,082 more than the five-year average." https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19roundup/2020-03-26 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... "The @ONS said the 16,387 deaths registered in England and Wales in the week to 3 April, was the highest weekly total since they started recording weekly deaths in 2005" https://twitter.com/ShaunLintern/status/1249990956302073856?s=20 https://twitter.com/ShaunLintern/status/1249990956302073856?... If we look at the weekly death for 2020, compared to the weekly death averaged for the past 5 years we see large spikes in excess mortality. We'd expect some increase because the UK has an ageing population, but not this much. https://twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1249983121254203395?s=20 https://twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1249983121254203395?... Or we can look at max / min mortality for each week since 2010, and overlay covid-19 excess mortality https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1250007002165755905?s=20 https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1250007002165755905?s... We can include flu and pneumonia https://twitter.com/philjvtaylor/status/1250094624707928065?s=20 https://twitter.com/philjvtaylor/status/1250094624707928065?... "Of the deaths registered, 3,475 mentioned coronavirus, which is 21 per cent of all deaths, compared to 539 deaths and 4.8 per cent of all deaths in the previous week." https://nhsproviders.org/topics/covid-19/coronavirus-member-support/national-guidance/government-updates/daily-updates https://nhsproviders.org/topics/covid-19/coronavirus-member-... (I upvoted you. I don't understand why you got downvotes.)

s9w 7y ago

This isn't exactly a good rebuttal to "it's just the flu". But it's still important datapoint in itself.

rootusrootus 7y ago
It's really just another data point. Using absolute numbers of deaths, it is hard to differentiate between an epidemic where R0 is moderate (say, 2.5) and the IFR is fairly high, or another where the R0 is higher (e.g. 6) and the IFR is lower. Both get you a lot of hospital load and an increased number of deaths. Some interesting studies coming out now supporting the iceberg theory. Depending on your perspective, that could be good news.

Leary 7y ago

So Germany, which is right next door to the Netherlands/France/Italy, is experiencing no excess mortality. What did they do right and how can we have some of that.

sveme 7y ago
We don‘t talk to our grandparents anymore.
splitrocket 7y ago
Listen to experts, have highly competent leadership, run a coordinated response. Incompetency kills.
- mc32 7y ago
  I don’t think that explains the whole situation, or at least I don’t believe that all but Germany have incompetent leaders, have bad experts, and lack coördination.
- 101404 7y ago
  Yep, that's the story the media here tells. Of course. "We are so exceptional, we Germans." In reality, we had just four times more ventilators available than any of the larger countries around us, so we never hit the "no treatment possible" situation.
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    No, that can't be it. Ventilators is a last resort kind of measure, most people under ventilators die either way, so they can't affect numbers much. I suspect Germany is just testing more and earlier than others.
    - 101404 7y ago
      No idea where you got that information. Testing in Germany started very late, but was then increased rapidly. As of today, Germany has done 1,317,887 tests. The US: 3,029,979 tests, Italy: 1,073,689 tests. (Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/) So not exceptionally more than others.

jose_zap 7y ago

One interesting thing that I can see there is that the current excess for many countries seem to be no worse so far from a larger excess in the early weeks of 2017. Another very surprising thing is to see no excess mortality in Sweden, a country criticized for a laxer strategy against COVID-19. I was not expecting to see that.

downerending 7y ago
I leaned towards Doomer, especially early on, but must admit that looked at on the scale of years, it's possible that this will turn out to be a blip followed by a new normal of (say) a three-percent higher rate. One caveat is that over the long run, everyone dies exactly once. A more interesting stat will be life-expectancy (i.e., presumed years lost). But then again, most people dying aren't losing that many years of their life expectancy. (Apologies for being grim.)
- cameldrv 7y ago
  Yes, but this is with everything locked down. The trick is going to be figuring out how to unlock without the doomer scenario occurring.
  - downerending 7y ago
    I meant that this is what I think might happen if/as lockdown is slowly released. There will be some trick in figuring out how slow is slow enough, and perhaps we'll go back and forth a bit, but this looks like what will happen. If we keep things locked down too long, immense numbers of people will die from that. We need to minimize all deaths, not just deaths from the virus.
    - antpls 7y ago
      > We need to minimize all deaths, not just deaths from the virus The recent events lead me to believe that it is not what countries are doing. Even WHO posted a figure in 2019 of 8 millions of deaths per year from Tabacco. The covid19 will not reach that level anytime soon, yet every country in the world accepted a major economy self-sacrifice to "save" people from covid19. How to explain that?

dominiclooser 7y ago

Is there anything in this data indicating that there is something going on more severe than the flu? I don't see anything.

ceejayoz 7y ago
"It's not worse than the flu when we lockdown the entire global economy" is not a comforting fact, even if true.
- dominiclooser 7y ago
  We don't know how it would have been without lockdown. We just see this data and it looks totally normal.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    > We don't know how it would have been without lockdown. Sure we do. It's not hard to see the curves flattening once mitigation efforts go into place, and slow-to-react countries having a harder time of it. https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ It also stands to reason that a respiratory virus would be affected by a country going on lockdown, given the mechanism.
petschge 7y ago
In data that are 2 days to 5 weeks old we see that it kills as many as a bad flue year despite massive efforts to contain it.
- dominiclooser 7y ago
  As far as I know, Sweden didn't do much lockdown and is in normal range too. (At least so far). If it stays this way: If it would have been really that massive without measure, shouldn't Sweden be a huge outlier?
  - 7y ago

vogre 7y ago

It's good to see how healthy people in Luxembourg became with all this pandemic!