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Whether weekly or annual, you wouldn’t be wrong to expect 2020 to have a noticeable uptick from Covid deaths. The fact that it does not points to one of two thi

Whether weekly or annual, you wouldn’t be wrong to expect 2020 to have a noticeable uptick from Covid deaths. The fact that it does not points to one of two things: reporting deaths has a lag time or, covid didn’t kill an unusual number of people compare to flu and pneumonia. I will point out that the US CDC tracks excess deaths on a weekly basis and you can clearly see we are above average from March until the present, as well as for the year overall.

meroes 6y ago
Too black and white. You need some measure of general population health, ICU capacity, access to affordable healthcare, etc to compare two populations' strategies and effects of covid. Any of these and more could easily be a confounding variable. Covid may not have produced excess deaths so far in Sweden compared to US, but maybe they have better work from home and thus fewer car accidents compared to a larger portion of people driving to work in the US.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  I think you may be missing my point, though. If you look at the set of graphs that another commenter posted that compare weekly rates, https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938 https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386... (go halfway down the page), you'll see that Sweden HAS produced excess deaths so far in 2020: 20% by this estimate, vs. 24% for the US.
  - rebuilder 6y ago
    Incidentally, many countries in the excess deaths graphic on FT seem to have had pretty serious spikes in mortality early in the year in previous years. Look at Germany, for example - something much deadlier than covid-19 seems to have struck them in a recent year. What is that?
    - hnarn 6y ago
      > something much deadlier than covid-19 Don't use this type of phrasing. The only way to know how deadly Covid-19 is compared to other unidentified changes in excess morality is to have access to an alternate reality where we did nothing about the spread. In our reality, we did a few pretty drastic things about the spread, which means that the comparison is essentially useless from the perspective of excess deaths. The only Covid-19 lethality comparison that makes sense is to compare the survival rate of those infected with those infected by another disease (or perhaps some other type of affliction).
      - rebuilder 6y ago
        Fair point. My intended meaning was to say the mortality rate in several countries had much higher spikes than the one for 2020.
    - tialaramex 6y ago
      Given it's in winter, probably an Influenza variant. Because Influenza (unlike some other causes of "flu" symptoms) is most widespread in winter, each hemisphere uses data from the other's winter to plan their seasonal vaccine. But this is like predicting the weather, even when you've had practice and are good at it on average, sometimes you miss badly. If you either guess wrongly what to vaccinate against based on the data from the other hemisphere, or Influenza mutates significantly after your cut off date to evade your profile, the vaccine is much less effective than normal, and higher than normal rate of hospitalizations and deaths results. Influenza is endemic, we never even wiped out the variant from the "Spanish Flu" pandemic last century, it's still with us is an attenuated form.
    - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
      The 2017-2018 flu season was particularly bad. Scroll down and see this graph from the CDC website: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm. You see a spike of excess mortality in early 2018, but it's much smaller than the continuing excess deaths for 2020 (this data is US only).
- Leherenn 6y ago
  And even then, it's not always easy to explain the difference. In Switzerland for instance, the French-speaking cantons have been massively more infected than the German-speaking ones. And while there are different rules depending on the canton (though the French ones tend to be much more strict), the same trend appears in bilingual cantons.
JeremyNT 6y ago
> The fact that it does not points to one of two things: reporting deaths has a lag time or, covid didn’t kill an unusual number of people compare to flu and pneumonia. Or people have modified their behaviors to avoid Covid, and thus are less likely to suffer deaths due to other causes of mortality (i.e., they drive less because of social distancing, they die of flu and other contagious diseases less because of social distancing, etc). If nobody modified their behaviors at all, you might have a point. But because people have modified their behaviors to avoid Covid, they're now trading one kind of risk for another.

meroes 6y ago

Too black and white. You need some measure of general population health, ICU capacity, access to affordable healthcare, etc to compare two populations' strategies and effects of covid. Any of these and more could easily be a confounding variable. Covid may not have produced excess deaths so far in Sweden compared to US, but maybe they have better work from home and thus fewer car accidents compared to a larger portion of people driving to work in the US.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I think you may be missing my point, though. If you look at the set of graphs that another commenter posted that compare weekly rates, https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938 https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386... (go halfway down the page), you'll see that Sweden HAS produced excess deaths so far in 2020: 20% by this estimate, vs. 24% for the US.
- rebuilder 6y ago
  Incidentally, many countries in the excess deaths graphic on FT seem to have had pretty serious spikes in mortality early in the year in previous years. Look at Germany, for example - something much deadlier than covid-19 seems to have struck them in a recent year. What is that?
  - hnarn 6y ago
    > something much deadlier than covid-19 Don't use this type of phrasing. The only way to know how deadly Covid-19 is compared to other unidentified changes in excess morality is to have access to an alternate reality where we did nothing about the spread. In our reality, we did a few pretty drastic things about the spread, which means that the comparison is essentially useless from the perspective of excess deaths. The only Covid-19 lethality comparison that makes sense is to compare the survival rate of those infected with those infected by another disease (or perhaps some other type of affliction).
    - rebuilder 6y ago
      Fair point. My intended meaning was to say the mortality rate in several countries had much higher spikes than the one for 2020.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    Given it's in winter, probably an Influenza variant. Because Influenza (unlike some other causes of "flu" symptoms) is most widespread in winter, each hemisphere uses data from the other's winter to plan their seasonal vaccine. But this is like predicting the weather, even when you've had practice and are good at it on average, sometimes you miss badly. If you either guess wrongly what to vaccinate against based on the data from the other hemisphere, or Influenza mutates significantly after your cut off date to evade your profile, the vaccine is much less effective than normal, and higher than normal rate of hospitalizations and deaths results. Influenza is endemic, we never even wiped out the variant from the "Spanish Flu" pandemic last century, it's still with us is an attenuated form.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    The 2017-2018 flu season was particularly bad. Scroll down and see this graph from the CDC website: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm. You see a spike of excess mortality in early 2018, but it's much smaller than the continuing excess deaths for 2020 (this data is US only).
Leherenn 6y ago
And even then, it's not always easy to explain the difference. In Switzerland for instance, the French-speaking cantons have been massively more infected than the German-speaking ones. And while there are different rules depending on the canton (though the French ones tend to be much more strict), the same trend appears in bilingual cantons.

JeremyNT 6y ago

> The fact that it does not points to one of two things: reporting deaths has a lag time or, covid didn’t kill an unusual number of people compare to flu and pneumonia. Or people have modified their behaviors to avoid Covid, and thus are less likely to suffer deaths due to other causes of mortality (i.e., they drive less because of social distancing, they die of flu and other contagious diseases less because of social distancing, etc). If nobody modified their behaviors at all, you might have a point. But because people have modified their behaviors to avoid Covid, they're now trading one kind of risk for another.