4 ms·

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 proba

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.)
- DataDaoDe 5y ago
  Thanks! That blog post was an interesting read, age adjusted mortality rates was something that hadn't occurred to me as someone unfamiliar with this type of data.

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.)

DataDaoDe 5y ago
Thanks! That blog post was an interesting read, age adjusted mortality rates was something that hadn't occurred to me as someone unfamiliar with this type of data.