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Excess Deaths in 2020

157 points by panic 5y ago

StavrosK 5y ago
This is terrible, but at least I can show this to my "AlL-CaUsE MorTAlItY WiLl Be tHe SaMe" friend so he can ignore it.
- heswrongsoru 5y ago
  You're made for each other. Excess deaths capture the deaths from lockdown related causes too, like my grandmother, who died when her social life was indefinitely stopped, and teenagers that committed suicide due to lockdowns Excess deaths don't tell us how deadly COVID really was, they tell us how deadly COVID plus the COVID response really were. Someday historians will argue: which was worse? The disease or the treatment? I don't think it's as clear cut in reality as you or your "friend" that you're mocking think. Maybe both of you should try listening to the people you disagree with
  - audunw 5y ago
    The problem with blaming the response, is that a strong response with very strict lockdowns is sometimes a result of a weak early response. That is, if you hesitate with doing lockdowns, you'll eventually be forced to do a much more severe and longer lasting lockdown anyway. A weak response will also overrun the hospitals, which makes it difficult for them to diagnose and treat other diseases. Norway has had no significant excess mortality through the entire pandemic. In recent months it has been well below 0%. It has been consistently been better than Sweden, which has had less restrictions and a similar culture. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores?country=BRA~NOR~USA~SWE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores... The restrictions in Norway has been less severe than many places with higher excess mortality. Why is that? My theory is that Norwegians have been very compliant with advice and restrictions set by the government, and the government has been pro-active with enacting restrictions. This has helped contain and suppress the spread of the virus to smaller geographical regions, so that other areas can avoid lockdowns. And it reduces the duration of outbreaks, meaning you can lift restrictions again more quickly. So my theory is that fighting against restrictions is extremely counter-productive. It only serves to create a culture of ignoring government advice, and makes politicians hesitate to enact necessary restrictions early, with the end result being more restrictions in total, not less.
    - petertodd 5y ago
      Sweden had an abnormally low death rate in 2019; Norway did not. Averaged over the past two years, Sweden's death rate in 2019 and 2020 is just 1.2% above 2018, as compared to Norway's 0.48% below 2018. It's quite likely that many people who would have died in 2019 in a normal year died in 2020 instead. https://www.statista.com/statistics/611743/number-of-deaths-in-norway/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/611743/number-of-deaths-... https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
  - pnutjam 5y ago
    I love it when people who ignore all the data and intelligent discussion around a subject argue that people aren't listening to them.
  - samth 5y ago
    Suicides were down in 2020 in the US. Australia had long and strict lockdowns, so has Vietnam. But they have negative excess deaths in 2020. There's no evidence whatsoever that lockdowns increased deaths, with the possible exception of an increase in fatal traffic accidents due to more speeding.
  - StavrosK 5y ago
    > Excess deaths capture the deaths from lockdown related causes too, like my grandmother, who died when her social life was indefinitely stopped, and teenagers that committed suicide due to lockdowns If only we had an easy mathematical tool to calculate how many people in the excess mortality numbers didn't die of COVID. We could call it "subtraction".
    - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
      But whether someone died of Covid or not is also another area of dispute. The "it's just a flu" crowd can cite dubious websites saying "Oh the government is fudging the stats, there were many deaths being recorded as Covid-deaths even if they're not (Stupid example: man flies off motorcycle into wall, dies. Autopsy shows he has the virus in his blood, the conspiracy theorists will say the Illuminati/Bill Gates/the government will record that as a death due to Covid). Inversely, there's also reports of governments not testing people who died for the virus, to make their numbers look good so they don't end up in some "Do not travel" list, or because they don't want their population angry and removing them from power. Even India is still fudging its numbers lately. At least it's hard to dispute the status of being dead, and "excess deaths" is a usable number.
  - watwut 5y ago
    > teenagers that committed suicide due to lockdowns This turned out to be false expectation. Turns out that while teenagers were unhappy and did not enjoyed the situation, they were able to adapt without destroying themselves.
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    It would be interesting if we could "reload from a save point" and try surviving the pandemic without lockdowns. IMO the number of COVID deaths would be higher. Of course some people think otherwise would hypothize the opposite. I guess a glib response would be to say "Look at fucking India right now". And it's a bit binary to argue e.g. "Sweden didn't have a lockdown, look, it wasn't that badthere.". Uh, even without a lockdown, Swedes changed their behavior (a lot of work from home, cafes and restaurants became emptier), and if we reloaded from that save point and didn't impose lockdowns, the cautious people would still stay home. And I wonder how many of the "But muh freedom!" moaners would be name-calling responsible organizers who cancelled concerts and festivals as "fascist nazis", etc.
015UUZn8aEvW 5y ago
I'd like to see a version of this analysis that incorporates all-cause mortality from a much larger time period; say the past fifty years rather than the past five.
- StavrosK 5y ago
  Why?
  - 015UUZn8aEvW 5y ago
    Because it would give people a better intuitive sense of how bad COVID is in a larger civilizational/historical context. Over the past 12+ months, people have accepted enormous infringements on freedoms in their everyday lives. Many of the public health measures that we take as a matter of course in the "new normal" - lockdowns, social distancing, extended closing of churches, etc.- are things that would have been almost unthinkable as recently as January of 2020. If you look far enough back, to some point in the twentieth century, you'll find a time at which the baseline infectious disease risk in everyday life was higher than it has been in the COVID-era US. But people at that time went to crowded theaters, ate in restaurants, packed together in churches and schools, and so on. Restricting these things could have decreased their all-cause mortality, but they clearly found that option unacceptable. Note that this isn't an issue of whether people "believe in science" or "believe in data". It's an issue of risk tolerance. People a few generations ago understood the Germ Theory of Disease perfectly well, and they knew that they could reduce the spread of infectious disease by implementing the kinds of measures we've implemented for COVID. And yet they didn't implement these measures, except in very minor and temporary ways. We've become far more risk-averse than they were. And the question of whether that's a good thing is not an empirical question.
    - StavrosK 5y ago
      I don't understand your argument. You're saying that because people didn't mind dying from infectous diseases at a time where scraping your hand could prove deadly, we shouldn't mind it today either?
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Why does it only go until 2015? This seems like data that would be better understood as per capita all cause mortality versus time over the last century. Anyone know where to find that plot?
- StavrosK 5y ago
  Why? You want to compare pre-COVID to COVID.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  Wouldn't you end up confounding a lot of different issues with that? Lifestyles and medicine has radically changed a fair bit in the last century, and so you'd end up with a bunch of confounding factors.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/23/us/covid-19-death-toll.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/23/us/covid-19-d... This is close to the analysis of interest. It’s true there are so many confounding issues, e.g. obesity rates have never been higher and are a huge cofactors, population inversion, etc.
    - StavrosK 5y ago
      Interesting that way fewer people died after the 1918 pandemic. I assume it "weeded out" all the people who were likely to die soon anyway, but what's more interesting is that the negative bar seems to be longer than the positive one, which would somehow mean that the pandemic saved lives? Very odd.
      - Jtsummers 5y ago
        1918 was also during WWI. While they mark that with the pandemic, are they including US service member deaths during the war in death totals? I'm trying to find a breakdown by year, but the total US deaths from the war was around 100k. Even taking them as evenly distributed over 1914-1918 (inaccurate) that's 20k extra deaths in each of those years.
sim_card_map 5y ago
For some reason Europe saw a lot fewer excess deaths in 2020. For example, in Germany it was only ~ +3%, and Sweden, which didn't lock down and had no mask mandates, had a lower death rate than in 2012: https://i.redd.it/73x3fysmu7k61.png https://i.redd.it/73x3fysmu7k61.png
- StavrosK 5y ago
  That's interesting, why is that?
  - tokai 5y ago
    Higher obesity in US maybe?
    - StavrosK 5y ago
      I doubt the entire US became sharply more obese in the past year, though, so much so that it also died from it.
      - graywh 5y ago
        the US was already more obese than Germany -- and obesity seems to correlate with higher covid-19 mortality
      - alexilliamson 5y ago
        But the pandemic could have hit the more obese American population harder.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - awild 5y ago
        I'm assuming tokai is saying that because obese people are more likely to have complications from Covid19, the US saw a higher increase in excess deaths, given that the obesity rate is higher than eg Germany.
MagnumOpus 5y ago
For international data, The Economist has the charts of excess mortality through 2020 for different countries: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
- StavrosK 5y ago
  That's a great visualization, thank you.
- kijin 5y ago
  The negative number of excess deaths in some Asian countries like Japan, Korea and Taiwan is interesting. I wonder if it's because of the very high rate of mask wearing that these countries have been known for since early in the pandemic. This might have helped reduce the number of deaths from influenza and other respiratory infections so much that they outweigh the deaths from Covid.
euroclydon 5y ago
In a year when Geico is giving their customers an across the board rebate on their premiums because driving miles are down so much, and driving accidents are the third or fourth leading cause of death in a non-pandemic year, I think we'd need to adjust downward the baseline. I wonder if these calculations take that into account?
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Driving deaths are up: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/974006735/tragic-driving-was-down-in-2020-but-traffic-fatality-rates-surged https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/974006735/tragic-driving-was-...
  - euroclydon 5y ago
    Thanks! That's wild!
- tiahura 5y ago
  'Tragic': Driving Was Down In 2020, But Traffic Fatality Rates Surged The National Safety Council (NSC) says deaths from motor vehicles rose 8% last year, with as many as 42,060 people dying in vehicle crashes. When comparing traffic deaths to the number of miles driven, the rate of fatalities rose 24% — the highest spike in nearly a century, NSC says. https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/974006735/tragic-driving-was-down-in-2020-but-traffic-fatality-rates-surged https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/974006735/tragic-driving-was-...
  - ortusdux 5y ago
    Enforcement went down to basically zero in my area. Now that the officers are vaccinated, they have started aggressively enforcing moving violations.
  - petertodd 5y ago
    Remember that kinetic energy is proportional to velocity squared. So if less traffic is letting people drive faster, that could easily result in more deaths. I live in a city, and average speeds certainly seem faster than pre-pandemic traffic. Also, working at home may be allowing people to avoid traffic because hours are less strict. Again, that would allow traffic to move faster on average.
fortran77 5y ago
It's interesting that in "normal" years, deaths go up in the middle of the winter and down in the middle of the summer.
- xxxxxxx12 5y ago
  Look up Hope-Simpson's work on influenza epidemiology, he observed seasonality like you say, but there are certain regimes that correspond to latitudes.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
DataDaoDe 5y ago
One thing I would like to know, and I don’t know enough about mortality measures so maybe someone who does could chip in, would be essentially what is the probability of observing a year like 2020 with respect to all cause mortality. Is it in 99th-percentile or are we looking at an observation within a standard deviation of the expected value,etc.
- Tade0 5y ago
  As a data point in my country (Poland) there haven't been that many deaths since WW2. The pre-war population of this country was around 34mln - a figure reached again in the early 70s - while currently it's slightly less than 38mln, so this event can definitely be seen as rare.
- simonh 5y ago
  Given the range of values over 5 years it seems pretty unlikely for most states, but might not be out of the question for say Hawaii or Vermont say. Unlikely, but not impossible. One factor to bear in mind is the 5 year period includes a particularly nasty flu season in 2017-18 so the last 5 year period includes a high outlier. The thing is over the long term all kinds of outlier events pop up, like this one, but it's hard to think of any with this magnitude. 9/11 killed 3k people in one go, but that's only one tenth of the excess deaths in New York from Covid in a single month. Even the 1906 Earthquake that devastated San Francisco only killed less than 1% of the city's population. World War 2 had an appreciable effect of course at 300k deaths over about 3 years. If we're including other pandemics of course there's the Spanish Flu which also killed about half a million Americans or more, against a population a third the size.
- JoeData 5y ago
  Short answer: In the U.S., 12 standard deviations. In the U.S., deaths were 16%-17% higher than expected. The death rate was 17.8% higher than in 2019. Excess deaths were higher in 1918, but every other year since 1900 is lower. Using 1946-2019 as our sample, the average yearly change in death rate is -0.2% with a standard deviation of about 1.47 (percentage points). The biggest increase in this year range was 3.1% (2.2σ). If we go back before the antibiotic era, the biggest one-year increases are in 1918 (29.3%) and 1929 (7.2%). Note that statistics before 1933 don't include all states. For some other ways of looking at the data, here's an economists blog post: https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/01/06/excess-mortality-in-2020/ https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/01/06/excess-morta... (He was writing in January, so had less complete stats.)
HideousKojima 5y ago
I'm curious if there's a good way to breakdown how much is caused by COVID vs., say, caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides, etc.). For example the US suicide rate declined from 2018 to 2019, but went back up in 2020. Naively assuming that all of the increase was due to the effects of the lockdowns would attribute ~2,880 suicides to them (or more if in a counterfactual world the suicide rate was going to continue declining if there hadn't been a lockdown). Obviously the real causes of these suicides would be difficult to impossible to determine with certainty, making this a difficult path to explore. In the UK a study predicts a 7.9-9.6% increase in breast cancer deaths within 5 years of diagnosis due to diagnostic delays caused by COVID. For other cancers their estimates vary, i.e. 15.3%-16.6% for colorectal, 4.8%-5.3% for lung, etc. thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(20)30388-0/fulltext Basically I guess what I'm really trying to get at is that while COVID is certainly a terrible disease, there seems to have been little to no cost-benefit analysis performed by policy makers regarding the lockdowns and other attempts to combat it.
- joshuahedlund 5y ago
  Suicides declined in 2020 [1] Cost benefit analysis is important. But it's pretty clear the vast majority of excess deaths were covid related, because there's a very strong correlation between excess deaths and reported covid cases/deaths, even when you look at different states that had different peaks at different times, and no such correlation to other responses like different types of lockdowns. More delayed / indirect / long-term effects might be harder to measure though. [1]https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-mental-health-26196eaf-a245-4d21-85eb-eeb864a24449.html https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-me...
  - HideousKojima 5y ago
    Weird, the first result when I did a search claimed it went up to 14.8 per 100,000 this year, from 13.9 per 100,000 last year according to the Google summary, but the actual page doesn't seem to actually have that data: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measure/Suicide/state/ALL https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measur... Looks like the CDC data is still preliminary? So I guess we'll have to wait and see what the actual number is. EDIT: Looking through the charts on that link it does list a 14.8 for 2020 suicides but doesn't seem to have a source?
lettergram 5y ago
I’m always fairly torn by these numbers (I’ve done a lot of research and tracked this[1]). There’s a lot of confounding factors... The lockdowns increased the rate of suicides substantially. Largely suicides occur in people 65+, so a 100% increase in suicides would be some 150k deaths in the same age range as COVID. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml Murder is also up some 50% and there were riots... Not disputing the excess deaths, just the causes aren’t all that clear imo. [1] https://github.com/lettergram/covid19-analysis https://github.com/lettergram/covid19-analysis
- gloryless 5y ago
  This is nonsense. Suicides are down in 2020. It was a virus that killed people, the deaths were reported. Conspiracy theories are so exhausting
  - shiftpgdn 5y ago
    You say that with such certainy but the official number I've seen is a 10% increase. Also there is no measure for misery.
    - shlant 5y ago
      it would be helpful if you provided your sources
  - lettergram 5y ago
    The government has an incentive to report deaths as covid deaths. I'm simply stating it is not 100% clear what causes the deaths. The reason I suspect a higher suicide rate than otherwise estimated is that the number of people with suicidal ideation has doubled. NOTE, I was also considering unintentional suicide (overdoses), which were dramatically up (38%). https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-deaths-covid-19.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-death... https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/16/suicides-fell-in-2020-while-rates-of-anxiety-depression-and-overdoses-continue-to-climb/ https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/16/suicides-fell-in-2020-w...
xxxxxxx12 5y ago
FWIW, an economist published this paper recently estimating "the cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282": > Generally speaking, the ineffectiveness of lockdown stems from voluntary changes in behavior. Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent noncompliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns. The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries. Using a cost/benefit method proposed by Professor Bryan Caplan, and using two extreme assumptions of lockdown effectiveness, the cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282. That is, it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history. http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf
- Retric 5y ago
  That’s exactly the kind of paper you get when economists are publishing outside their specialty. Most interesting example was he excluded any data that was counter to his theory and used highly overfit data. “Whether Atkeson (February 2021) has correctly modeled the Covid-19 virus is not at issue.” They can’t exactly do cost benefit analysis without models to compare, but their cherry picking models to support their assumptions and then happy that their assumptions where validated by their models.
  - HideousKojima 5y ago
    The point he's making in that section is that by accounting for voluntary changes in human behavior (or failing to account for it as many models did) will drastically affect the results of any model that attempts to predict the rate of spread.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Human behavior is also influenced by messaging. You can’t assume economically rational actors in the real world when modeling actual behavior as people don’t know actual risks etc. In a non lockdown world where schools are open and attendance is mandatory... well it’s clear to the average person the government doesn’t think people need to stay home. Sure, old people are dying in hospitals but I am 40 so it’s nothing to worry about etc. However, shut everything down and people get the message that this is serious irrespective of the actual dangers they personally face.
klahnakoski2 5y ago
I see the 2020 mortality no different from other years: https://github.com/klahnakoski/mo-statcan#example---covid-19 https://github.com/klahnakoski/mo-statcan#example---covid-19
erfgh 5y ago
I'm suprised by the number of people arguing for and against the lockdowns using just deaths statistics. Lockdowns of the duration that we experienced should be illegal because they take away the citizens' liberties to an extent that no government should be able to take them away. It has nothing to do with health.
- efnx 5y ago
  If I read your comment correctly, whether or not the lockdowns are legal should Not have anything to do with health. So what you are saying is that you don’t care if it’s a health risk - nobody should ever be able to order you to stay in your home by fear of fines or imprisonments etc. IMO that would be fine so long as we had a citizenship that was well educated and the topic of virus spread had not been politicized to the point that certain groups believe the virus itself is a conspiracy.
- dennis_jeeves 5y ago
  >Lockdowns of the duration that we experienced should be illegal I fully agree with you. If people want to sit at home it should be a personal choice. However people do like to control other peoples lives, that is the bottom line and they will use any argument to justify it.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    The thing is though that, by and large, there never were "lockdowns" in the US. I'm sure there are exceptions but most people were free to go out in public if they wanted to (perhaps with masks/distancing), many types of "essential" businesses remained open, etc.
    - ryandrake 5y ago
      I know in my area, there was zero enforcement of travel restrictions, zero enforcement of stay-at-home, zero government enforcement of mask wearing (shops generally had to kick people out), and very spotty enforcement of business closures. There was no lockdown. It was totally voluntary, and luckily enough people voluntarily did the right thing that hospitals didn't overflow.
SpaceNinja 5y ago
The true covid death rate has been tricky to record in the UK, a positive test result within 28 days prior to death is recorded as a covid death, even if the death was caused by something else. We obviously don't know enough about COVID to know if it is contributing all the COVID registered deaths.
- JoeData 5y ago
  The UK government publishes other ways to measure COVID deaths. the "positive test result with 28 days of death" results in the lowest count: Deaths in England and Wales in 2020 80,830 Covid-19 as underlying cause of death or contributing factor 77,161 Increase in deaths (from all causes) from 2019 to 2020 73,444 Covid-19 as underlying cause of death on death certificate 70,013 Any death within 28 days of a positive Covid test Sources: https://fullfact.org/health/liam-fox-death-figures/ https://fullfact.org/health/liam-fox-death-figures/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/22/uk-official-covid-death-toll-undercounted-fatalities https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/22/uk-official-co... https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths
CodeWriter23 5y ago
Big problem with this type of calculation: it is based on the prior n-years of data. These figures do not consider that the just this year, the leading edge of Baby Boomers are achieving their average life expectancy and dying. There needs to be some corrective math that takes the birth rate at (current year - average life expectancy) into account.
- Thiez 5y ago
  I doubt a rising wave of baby boomer deaths is going to have a significant change on those statistics, but if your objection is correct, the death rate should continue to rise, so in a couple of years we can look back and see if you were right. Or look at mortality by age.
- jnwatson 5y ago
  We don't have a system where you hit 75 years old and drop dead. Everybody got a year older, and ~21% of those were baby boomers. The statistical impact of that on a year-by-year basis is minimal.
  - CodeWriter23 5y ago
    On average, that’s exactly the system we have. Nice attempt at sounding authoritative while attempting to invert a fundamental reality, that more births obviously results in more deaths.
JoeData 5y ago
Here is some more data. Deaths from all causes has declined rapidly in the U.S. since January. The red dotted line is my best attempt to correct for reporting lag: https://i.imgur.com/z8M0k2h.png https://i.imgur.com/z8M0k2h.png Excess deaths exceeded COVID deaths every week of the pandemic: https://i.imgur.com/MeGMsRx.png https://i.imgur.com/MeGMsRx.png Total excess deaths in the U.S. were about 500,000 for 2020. The excess breaks down as 77% COVID, 16% non-COVID natural causes, and 7% external causes for the whole year. External causes include homicide, suicide, accidents, overdoses/poisonings. The count of COVID deaths include COVID as underlying cause of death (91%) and COVID as a contributing cause (9%). Even when including the contributing cause, it looks like COVID deaths were significantly undercounted in the first wave March/April/May and somewhat undercounted in the later waves. https://i.imgur.com/YjZeI2E.png https://i.imgur.com/YjZeI2E.png Deaths from most major categories were higher or unchanged: https://i.imgur.com/TDGwVU9.png https://i.imgur.com/TDGwVU9.png Excess deaths by age group: https://i.imgur.com/oKda9Dl.png https://i.imgur.com/oKda9Dl.png Ages 0-14 had lower than normal deaths in 2020. Non-COVID excess deaths by age group: https://i.imgur.com/8pJnauz.png https://i.imgur.com/8pJnauz.png
- gmiller123456 5y ago
  >Excess deaths exceeded COVID deaths every week of the pandemic: https://i.imgur.com/MeGMsRx.png https://i.imgur.com/MeGMsRx.png Not entirely sure how to parse that statement, but I think most people would interpret that as "non-COVID excess deaths exceeded COVID deaths", which doesn't match what's on your graph. E.g. for week 15, expected deaths = 55k, deaths - COVID = 63k and all deaths=79k. The only truthful way to interpret your statement is that "excess deaths (including COVID deaths) exceeded COVID deaths". Which isn't that interesting of a statistic.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    It is very interesting. It means that either covid deaths were undercounted, or something else unique to 2020 also killed a large number of people, or both.
    - 5y ago
fumblebee 5y ago
All this being with lockdowns, which are demonstrably effective at slowing viral spread. Just imagine what these charts would look like _without_ lockdowns.
rednerrus 5y ago
This comment section is a pretty strong argument that we are living in a post-truth future.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

157 points by panic 5y ago

StavrosK 5y ago

This is terrible, but at least I can show this to my "AlL-CaUsE MorTAlItY WiLl Be tHe SaMe" friend so he can ignore it.

heswrongsoru 5y ago
You're made for each other. Excess deaths capture the deaths from lockdown related causes too, like my grandmother, who died when her social life was indefinitely stopped, and teenagers that committed suicide due to lockdowns Excess deaths don't tell us how deadly COVID really was, they tell us how deadly COVID plus the COVID response really were. Someday historians will argue: which was worse? The disease or the treatment? I don't think it's as clear cut in reality as you or your "friend" that you're mocking think. Maybe both of you should try listening to the people you disagree with
- audunw 5y ago
  The problem with blaming the response, is that a strong response with very strict lockdowns is sometimes a result of a weak early response. That is, if you hesitate with doing lockdowns, you'll eventually be forced to do a much more severe and longer lasting lockdown anyway. A weak response will also overrun the hospitals, which makes it difficult for them to diagnose and treat other diseases. Norway has had no significant excess mortality through the entire pandemic. In recent months it has been well below 0%. It has been consistently been better than Sweden, which has had less restrictions and a similar culture. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores?country=BRA~NOR~USA~SWE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores... The restrictions in Norway has been less severe than many places with higher excess mortality. Why is that? My theory is that Norwegians have been very compliant with advice and restrictions set by the government, and the government has been pro-active with enacting restrictions. This has helped contain and suppress the spread of the virus to smaller geographical regions, so that other areas can avoid lockdowns. And it reduces the duration of outbreaks, meaning you can lift restrictions again more quickly. So my theory is that fighting against restrictions is extremely counter-productive. It only serves to create a culture of ignoring government advice, and makes politicians hesitate to enact necessary restrictions early, with the end result being more restrictions in total, not less.
  - petertodd 5y ago
    Sweden had an abnormally low death rate in 2019; Norway did not. Averaged over the past two years, Sweden's death rate in 2019 and 2020 is just 1.2% above 2018, as compared to Norway's 0.48% below 2018. It's quite likely that many people who would have died in 2019 in a normal year died in 2020 instead. https://www.statista.com/statistics/611743/number-of-deaths-in-norway/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/611743/number-of-deaths-... https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
- pnutjam 5y ago
  I love it when people who ignore all the data and intelligent discussion around a subject argue that people aren't listening to them.
- samth 5y ago
  Suicides were down in 2020 in the US. Australia had long and strict lockdowns, so has Vietnam. But they have negative excess deaths in 2020. There's no evidence whatsoever that lockdowns increased deaths, with the possible exception of an increase in fatal traffic accidents due to more speeding.
- StavrosK 5y ago
  > Excess deaths capture the deaths from lockdown related causes too, like my grandmother, who died when her social life was indefinitely stopped, and teenagers that committed suicide due to lockdowns If only we had an easy mathematical tool to calculate how many people in the excess mortality numbers didn't die of COVID. We could call it "subtraction".
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    But whether someone died of Covid or not is also another area of dispute. The "it's just a flu" crowd can cite dubious websites saying "Oh the government is fudging the stats, there were many deaths being recorded as Covid-deaths even if they're not (Stupid example: man flies off motorcycle into wall, dies. Autopsy shows he has the virus in his blood, the conspiracy theorists will say the Illuminati/Bill Gates/the government will record that as a death due to Covid). Inversely, there's also reports of governments not testing people who died for the virus, to make their numbers look good so they don't end up in some "Do not travel" list, or because they don't want their population angry and removing them from power. Even India is still fudging its numbers lately. At least it's hard to dispute the status of being dead, and "excess deaths" is a usable number.
- watwut 5y ago
  > teenagers that committed suicide due to lockdowns This turned out to be false expectation. Turns out that while teenagers were unhappy and did not enjoyed the situation, they were able to adapt without destroying themselves.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  It would be interesting if we could "reload from a save point" and try surviving the pandemic without lockdowns. IMO the number of COVID deaths would be higher. Of course some people think otherwise would hypothize the opposite. I guess a glib response would be to say "Look at fucking India right now". And it's a bit binary to argue e.g. "Sweden didn't have a lockdown, look, it wasn't that badthere.". Uh, even without a lockdown, Swedes changed their behavior (a lot of work from home, cafes and restaurants became emptier), and if we reloaded from that save point and didn't impose lockdowns, the cautious people would still stay home. And I wonder how many of the "But muh freedom!" moaners would be name-calling responsible organizers who cancelled concerts and festivals as "fascist nazis", etc.

015UUZn8aEvW 5y ago

I'd like to see a version of this analysis that incorporates all-cause mortality from a much larger time period; say the past fifty years rather than the past five.

StavrosK 5y ago
Why?
- 015UUZn8aEvW 5y ago
  Because it would give people a better intuitive sense of how bad COVID is in a larger civilizational/historical context. Over the past 12+ months, people have accepted enormous infringements on freedoms in their everyday lives. Many of the public health measures that we take as a matter of course in the "new normal" - lockdowns, social distancing, extended closing of churches, etc.- are things that would have been almost unthinkable as recently as January of 2020. If you look far enough back, to some point in the twentieth century, you'll find a time at which the baseline infectious disease risk in everyday life was higher than it has been in the COVID-era US. But people at that time went to crowded theaters, ate in restaurants, packed together in churches and schools, and so on. Restricting these things could have decreased their all-cause mortality, but they clearly found that option unacceptable. Note that this isn't an issue of whether people "believe in science" or "believe in data". It's an issue of risk tolerance. People a few generations ago understood the Germ Theory of Disease perfectly well, and they knew that they could reduce the spread of infectious disease by implementing the kinds of measures we've implemented for COVID. And yet they didn't implement these measures, except in very minor and temporary ways. We've become far more risk-averse than they were. And the question of whether that's a good thing is not an empirical question.
  - StavrosK 5y ago
    I don't understand your argument. You're saying that because people didn't mind dying from infectous diseases at a time where scraping your hand could prove deadly, we shouldn't mind it today either?

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Why does it only go until 2015? This seems like data that would be better understood as per capita all cause mortality versus time over the last century. Anyone know where to find that plot?

StavrosK 5y ago
Why? You want to compare pre-COVID to COVID.
SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
Wouldn't you end up confounding a lot of different issues with that? Lifestyles and medicine has radically changed a fair bit in the last century, and so you'd end up with a bunch of confounding factors.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/23/us/covid-19-death-toll.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/23/us/covid-19-d... This is close to the analysis of interest. It’s true there are so many confounding issues, e.g. obesity rates have never been higher and are a huge cofactors, population inversion, etc.
  - StavrosK 5y ago
    Interesting that way fewer people died after the 1918 pandemic. I assume it "weeded out" all the people who were likely to die soon anyway, but what's more interesting is that the negative bar seems to be longer than the positive one, which would somehow mean that the pandemic saved lives? Very odd.
    - Jtsummers 5y ago
      1918 was also during WWI. While they mark that with the pandemic, are they including US service member deaths during the war in death totals? I'm trying to find a breakdown by year, but the total US deaths from the war was around 100k. Even taking them as evenly distributed over 1914-1918 (inaccurate) that's 20k extra deaths in each of those years.

sim_card_map 5y ago

For some reason Europe saw a lot fewer excess deaths in 2020. For example, in Germany it was only ~ +3%, and Sweden, which didn't lock down and had no mask mandates, had a lower death rate than in 2012: https://i.redd.it/73x3fysmu7k61.png https://i.redd.it/73x3fysmu7k61.png

StavrosK 5y ago
That's interesting, why is that?
- tokai 5y ago
  Higher obesity in US maybe?
  - StavrosK 5y ago
    I doubt the entire US became sharply more obese in the past year, though, so much so that it also died from it.
    - graywh 5y ago
      the US was already more obese than Germany -- and obesity seems to correlate with higher covid-19 mortality
    - alexilliamson 5y ago
      But the pandemic could have hit the more obese American population harder.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - awild 5y ago
      I'm assuming tokai is saying that because obese people are more likely to have complications from Covid19, the US saw a higher increase in excess deaths, given that the obesity rate is higher than eg Germany.

MagnumOpus 5y ago

For international data, The Economist has the charts of excess mortality through 2020 for different countries: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

StavrosK 5y ago
That's a great visualization, thank you.
kijin 5y ago
The negative number of excess deaths in some Asian countries like Japan, Korea and Taiwan is interesting. I wonder if it's because of the very high rate of mask wearing that these countries have been known for since early in the pandemic. This might have helped reduce the number of deaths from influenza and other respiratory infections so much that they outweigh the deaths from Covid.

euroclydon 5y ago

In a year when Geico is giving their customers an across the board rebate on their premiums because driving miles are down so much, and driving accidents are the third or fourth leading cause of death in a non-pandemic year, I think we'd need to adjust downward the baseline. I wonder if these calculations take that into account?

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Driving deaths are up: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/974006735/tragic-driving-was-down-in-2020-but-traffic-fatality-rates-surged https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/974006735/tragic-driving-was-...
- euroclydon 5y ago
  Thanks! That's wild!
tiahura 5y ago
'Tragic': Driving Was Down In 2020, But Traffic Fatality Rates Surged The National Safety Council (NSC) says deaths from motor vehicles rose 8% last year, with as many as 42,060 people dying in vehicle crashes. When comparing traffic deaths to the number of miles driven, the rate of fatalities rose 24% — the highest spike in nearly a century, NSC says. https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/974006735/tragic-driving-was-down-in-2020-but-traffic-fatality-rates-surged https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/974006735/tragic-driving-was-...
- ortusdux 5y ago
  Enforcement went down to basically zero in my area. Now that the officers are vaccinated, they have started aggressively enforcing moving violations.
- petertodd 5y ago
  Remember that kinetic energy is proportional to velocity squared. So if less traffic is letting people drive faster, that could easily result in more deaths. I live in a city, and average speeds certainly seem faster than pre-pandemic traffic. Also, working at home may be allowing people to avoid traffic because hours are less strict. Again, that would allow traffic to move faster on average.

fortran77 5y ago

It's interesting that in "normal" years, deaths go up in the middle of the winter and down in the middle of the summer.

xxxxxxx12 5y ago
Look up Hope-Simpson's work on influenza epidemiology, he observed seasonality like you say, but there are certain regimes that correspond to latitudes.

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DataDaoDe 5y ago

One thing I would like to know, and I don’t know enough about mortality measures so maybe someone who does could chip in, would be essentially what is the probability of observing a year like 2020 with respect to all cause mortality. Is it in 99th-percentile or are we looking at an observation within a standard deviation of the expected value,etc.

Tade0 5y ago
As a data point in my country (Poland) there haven't been that many deaths since WW2. The pre-war population of this country was around 34mln - a figure reached again in the early 70s - while currently it's slightly less than 38mln, so this event can definitely be seen as rare.
simonh 5y ago
Given the range of values over 5 years it seems pretty unlikely for most states, but might not be out of the question for say Hawaii or Vermont say. Unlikely, but not impossible. One factor to bear in mind is the 5 year period includes a particularly nasty flu season in 2017-18 so the last 5 year period includes a high outlier. The thing is over the long term all kinds of outlier events pop up, like this one, but it's hard to think of any with this magnitude. 9/11 killed 3k people in one go, but that's only one tenth of the excess deaths in New York from Covid in a single month. Even the 1906 Earthquake that devastated San Francisco only killed less than 1% of the city's population. World War 2 had an appreciable effect of course at 300k deaths over about 3 years. If we're including other pandemics of course there's the Spanish Flu which also killed about half a million Americans or more, against a population a third the size.
JoeData 5y ago
Short answer: In the U.S., 12 standard deviations. In the U.S., deaths were 16%-17% higher than expected. The death rate was 17.8% higher than in 2019. Excess deaths were higher in 1918, but every other year since 1900 is lower. Using 1946-2019 as our sample, the average yearly change in death rate is -0.2% with a standard deviation of about 1.47 (percentage points). The biggest increase in this year range was 3.1% (2.2σ). If we go back before the antibiotic era, the biggest one-year increases are in 1918 (29.3%) and 1929 (7.2%). Note that statistics before 1933 don't include all states. For some other ways of looking at the data, here's an economists blog post: https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/01/06/excess-mortality-in-2020/ https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/01/06/excess-morta... (He was writing in January, so had less complete stats.)

HideousKojima 5y ago

I'm curious if there's a good way to breakdown how much is caused by COVID vs., say, caused by the lockdown (i.e. delayed elective medical procedures, suicides, etc.). For example the US suicide rate declined from 2018 to 2019, but went back up in 2020. Naively assuming that all of the increase was due to the effects of the lockdowns would attribute ~2,880 suicides to them (or more if in a counterfactual world the suicide rate was going to continue declining if there hadn't been a lockdown). Obviously the real causes of these suicides would be difficult to impossible to determine with certainty, making this a difficult path to explore. In the UK a study predicts a 7.9-9.6% increase in breast cancer deaths within 5 years of diagnosis due to diagnostic delays caused by COVID. For other cancers their estimates vary, i.e. 15.3%-16.6% for colorectal, 4.8%-5.3% for lung, etc. thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(20)30388-0/fulltext Basically I guess what I'm really trying to get at is that while COVID is certainly a terrible disease, there seems to have been little to no cost-benefit analysis performed by policy makers regarding the lockdowns and other attempts to combat it.

joshuahedlund 5y ago
Suicides declined in 2020 [1] Cost benefit analysis is important. But it's pretty clear the vast majority of excess deaths were covid related, because there's a very strong correlation between excess deaths and reported covid cases/deaths, even when you look at different states that had different peaks at different times, and no such correlation to other responses like different types of lockdowns. More delayed / indirect / long-term effects might be harder to measure though. [1]https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-mental-health-26196eaf-a245-4d21-85eb-eeb864a24449.html https://www.axios.com/suicide-decreased-in-2020-pandemmic-me...
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  Weird, the first result when I did a search claimed it went up to 14.8 per 100,000 this year, from 13.9 per 100,000 last year according to the Google summary, but the actual page doesn't seem to actually have that data: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measure/Suicide/state/ALL https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measur... Looks like the CDC data is still preliminary? So I guess we'll have to wait and see what the actual number is. EDIT: Looking through the charts on that link it does list a 14.8 for 2020 suicides but doesn't seem to have a source?

lettergram 5y ago

I’m always fairly torn by these numbers (I’ve done a lot of research and tracked this[1]). There’s a lot of confounding factors... The lockdowns increased the rate of suicides substantially. Largely suicides occur in people 65+, so a 100% increase in suicides would be some 150k deaths in the same age range as COVID. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml Murder is also up some 50% and there were riots... Not disputing the excess deaths, just the causes aren’t all that clear imo. [1] https://github.com/lettergram/covid19-analysis https://github.com/lettergram/covid19-analysis

gloryless 5y ago
This is nonsense. Suicides are down in 2020. It was a virus that killed people, the deaths were reported. Conspiracy theories are so exhausting
- shiftpgdn 5y ago
  You say that with such certainy but the official number I've seen is a 10% increase. Also there is no measure for misery.
  - shlant 5y ago
    it would be helpful if you provided your sources
- lettergram 5y ago
  The government has an incentive to report deaths as covid deaths. I'm simply stating it is not 100% clear what causes the deaths. The reason I suspect a higher suicide rate than otherwise estimated is that the number of people with suicidal ideation has doubled. NOTE, I was also considering unintentional suicide (overdoses), which were dramatically up (38%). https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-deaths-covid-19.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-death... https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/16/suicides-fell-in-2020-while-rates-of-anxiety-depression-and-overdoses-continue-to-climb/ https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/16/suicides-fell-in-2020-w...

xxxxxxx12 5y ago

FWIW, an economist published this paper recently estimating "the cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282": > Generally speaking, the ineffectiveness of lockdown stems from voluntary changes in behavior. Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent noncompliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns. The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries. Using a cost/benefit method proposed by Professor Bryan Caplan, and using two extreme assumptions of lockdown effectiveness, the cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282. That is, it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history. http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf

Retric 5y ago
That’s exactly the kind of paper you get when economists are publishing outside their specialty. Most interesting example was he excluded any data that was counter to his theory and used highly overfit data. “Whether Atkeson (February 2021) has correctly modeled the Covid-19 virus is not at issue.” They can’t exactly do cost benefit analysis without models to compare, but their cherry picking models to support their assumptions and then happy that their assumptions where validated by their models.
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  The point he's making in that section is that by accounting for voluntary changes in human behavior (or failing to account for it as many models did) will drastically affect the results of any model that attempts to predict the rate of spread.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Human behavior is also influenced by messaging. You can’t assume economically rational actors in the real world when modeling actual behavior as people don’t know actual risks etc. In a non lockdown world where schools are open and attendance is mandatory... well it’s clear to the average person the government doesn’t think people need to stay home. Sure, old people are dying in hospitals but I am 40 so it’s nothing to worry about etc. However, shut everything down and people get the message that this is serious irrespective of the actual dangers they personally face.

klahnakoski2 5y ago

I see the 2020 mortality no different from other years: https://github.com/klahnakoski/mo-statcan#example---covid-19 https://github.com/klahnakoski/mo-statcan#example---covid-19

erfgh 5y ago

I'm suprised by the number of people arguing for and against the lockdowns using just deaths statistics. Lockdowns of the duration that we experienced should be illegal because they take away the citizens' liberties to an extent that no government should be able to take them away. It has nothing to do with health.

efnx 5y ago
If I read your comment correctly, whether or not the lockdowns are legal should Not have anything to do with health. So what you are saying is that you don’t care if it’s a health risk - nobody should ever be able to order you to stay in your home by fear of fines or imprisonments etc. IMO that would be fine so long as we had a citizenship that was well educated and the topic of virus spread had not been politicized to the point that certain groups believe the virus itself is a conspiracy.
dennis_jeeves 5y ago
>Lockdowns of the duration that we experienced should be illegal I fully agree with you. If people want to sit at home it should be a personal choice. However people do like to control other peoples lives, that is the bottom line and they will use any argument to justify it.
- ghaff 5y ago
  The thing is though that, by and large, there never were "lockdowns" in the US. I'm sure there are exceptions but most people were free to go out in public if they wanted to (perhaps with masks/distancing), many types of "essential" businesses remained open, etc.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    I know in my area, there was zero enforcement of travel restrictions, zero enforcement of stay-at-home, zero government enforcement of mask wearing (shops generally had to kick people out), and very spotty enforcement of business closures. There was no lockdown. It was totally voluntary, and luckily enough people voluntarily did the right thing that hospitals didn't overflow.

SpaceNinja 5y ago

The true covid death rate has been tricky to record in the UK, a positive test result within 28 days prior to death is recorded as a covid death, even if the death was caused by something else. We obviously don't know enough about COVID to know if it is contributing all the COVID registered deaths.

JoeData 5y ago
The UK government publishes other ways to measure COVID deaths. the "positive test result with 28 days of death" results in the lowest count: Deaths in England and Wales in 2020 80,830 Covid-19 as underlying cause of death or contributing factor 77,161 Increase in deaths (from all causes) from 2019 to 2020 73,444 Covid-19 as underlying cause of death on death certificate 70,013 Any death within 28 days of a positive Covid test Sources: https://fullfact.org/health/liam-fox-death-figures/ https://fullfact.org/health/liam-fox-death-figures/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/22/uk-official-covid-death-toll-undercounted-fatalities https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/22/uk-official-co... https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths

CodeWriter23 5y ago

Big problem with this type of calculation: it is based on the prior n-years of data. These figures do not consider that the just this year, the leading edge of Baby Boomers are achieving their average life expectancy and dying. There needs to be some corrective math that takes the birth rate at (current year - average life expectancy) into account.

Thiez 5y ago
I doubt a rising wave of baby boomer deaths is going to have a significant change on those statistics, but if your objection is correct, the death rate should continue to rise, so in a couple of years we can look back and see if you were right. Or look at mortality by age.
jnwatson 5y ago
We don't have a system where you hit 75 years old and drop dead. Everybody got a year older, and ~21% of those were baby boomers. The statistical impact of that on a year-by-year basis is minimal.
- CodeWriter23 5y ago
  On average, that’s exactly the system we have. Nice attempt at sounding authoritative while attempting to invert a fundamental reality, that more births obviously results in more deaths.

JoeData 5y ago

Here is some more data. Deaths from all causes has declined rapidly in the U.S. since January. The red dotted line is my best attempt to correct for reporting lag: https://i.imgur.com/z8M0k2h.png https://i.imgur.com/z8M0k2h.png Excess deaths exceeded COVID deaths every week of the pandemic: https://i.imgur.com/MeGMsRx.png https://i.imgur.com/MeGMsRx.png Total excess deaths in the U.S. were about 500,000 for 2020. The excess breaks down as 77% COVID, 16% non-COVID natural causes, and 7% external causes for the whole year. External causes include homicide, suicide, accidents, overdoses/poisonings. The count of COVID deaths include COVID as underlying cause of death (91%) and COVID as a contributing cause (9%). Even when including the contributing cause, it looks like COVID deaths were significantly undercounted in the first wave March/April/May and somewhat undercounted in the later waves. https://i.imgur.com/YjZeI2E.png https://i.imgur.com/YjZeI2E.png Deaths from most major categories were higher or unchanged: https://i.imgur.com/TDGwVU9.png https://i.imgur.com/TDGwVU9.png Excess deaths by age group: https://i.imgur.com/oKda9Dl.png https://i.imgur.com/oKda9Dl.png Ages 0-14 had lower than normal deaths in 2020. Non-COVID excess deaths by age group: https://i.imgur.com/8pJnauz.png https://i.imgur.com/8pJnauz.png

gmiller123456 5y ago
>Excess deaths exceeded COVID deaths every week of the pandemic: https://i.imgur.com/MeGMsRx.png https://i.imgur.com/MeGMsRx.png Not entirely sure how to parse that statement, but I think most people would interpret that as "non-COVID excess deaths exceeded COVID deaths", which doesn't match what's on your graph. E.g. for week 15, expected deaths = 55k, deaths - COVID = 63k and all deaths=79k. The only truthful way to interpret your statement is that "excess deaths (including COVID deaths) exceeded COVID deaths". Which isn't that interesting of a statistic.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  It is very interesting. It means that either covid deaths were undercounted, or something else unique to 2020 also killed a large number of people, or both.
  - 5y ago

fumblebee 5y ago

All this being with lockdowns, which are demonstrably effective at slowing viral spread. Just imagine what these charts would look like _without_ lockdowns.

rednerrus 5y ago

This comment section is a pretty strong argument that we are living in a post-truth future.

deleted 5y ago

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