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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

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).

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).