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On the other hand: "in many European countries there was a spike of excess deaths in weeks 31–35 during a period when COVID-19 reported deaths were extremely l

On the other hand: "in many European countries there was a spike of excess deaths in weeks 31–35 during a period when COVID-19 reported deaths were extremely low. This period coincided with a heat wave and national reports of deaths due to the heat wave. We excluded these weeks of data from subsequent analyses." I personally wouldn't have excluded these weeks - unless you're going to exclude historical (near-annual) heatwaves from the figures, this should balance out. > All you can do is throw up your hands and go back to first principles: without prospective validation, statistical models are fiction. No estimation is perfect, nor expected to be, and so your criticism is unreasonable. You're doing exactly the things that you are criticising the study for, and more so. You provide zero evidence to counter their sourced evidence, and ignore and dismiss points that don't match what you are trying to say.

timr 5y ago
> No estimation is perfect, nor expected to be, and so your criticism is unreasonable. You're doing exactly the things that you are criticising the study for, and more so. You provide zero evidence to counter their sourced evidence, and ignore and dismiss points that don't match what you are trying to say. They have provided no "evidence" -- they made a model. They have provided no validation of that model, so it could be completely incorrect. Nobody knows. Furthermore, I just showed you that of the sourced evidence they did consider, they dismissed nearly everything that reduced the death rate attributable to Covid, and said it was "too dificult" to quantify. Mathematical models without prospective validation are not evidence. They are not science. They are bedtime stories.