4 ms·

The real question is if we have excess mortality, and if we do, what is the cause? This chart shows excess mortality over the past few years: https://ourworld

The real question is if we have excess mortality, and if we do, what is the cause? This chart shows excess mortality over the past few years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... You can see the pre pandemic year 2018, and the impact of the flu that year. It was a bad flu year, and at its peak, excess mortality was higher than many times during covid. Flu's pretty serious. Then during the pandemic, the elevated excess mortality due to covid, but also likely to some extent our responses to covid. This summer, we're almost back to normal.

tostonescon 4y ago
This is a very odd interpretation of the data that you yourself linked, unless I misread your intention or the data you linked 2018 flu season spent about a month at 5000 excess on this chart. We've spent the last two and half years with a typical floor of 5000 excess, except for April of 2021 and 2022. So over the past two and half years, we've had about two months of time that there are fewer excess deaths than the bad 2018 flu season. I agree we are re-approaching nominal as this surge cools down, but the 2021 data shows that even post vaccine and infection granted immunity surges are liable to happen quickly
- tomohawk 4y ago
  The graph clearly shows the peak in 2018 at 67,661 on Jan 12. That is a higher level than mid May through to Nov in 2020, as but one example. I'm not sure where the 5000 number you cite comes from. The chart I attempted to show was for the US.
Genbox 4y ago
Excess mortality is not a great measurement for this. Not only is there no clear standard for calculating it across the world, but there are also large errors associated with the data it is calculated from. A lot of models do not take age distribution into account. For example, if you have a "boomer" generation that is transition into a high-risk-of-dying age group, then the projected number of deaths will be low and the deaths high, making it look like you have a lot of excess mortality. Slightly more complex models that project the number of deaths from a larger timeframe (for example 5 years) minimize this kind of error, but there are still many more factors to take into account. EuroMOMO is a European standard for calculating excess mortality. They calculate data variance and thresholds where the model would consider deaths outside of statistical error[1]. Across European 28 countries (420 million people) their model shows[2] a considerable amount of excess deaths in 2020, 2021 and 2022. So according to that model, the pandemic is very much still a present danger. [1] https://www.euromomo.eu/how-it-works/methods/ https://www.euromomo.eu/how-it-works/methods/ [2] https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

tostonescon 4y ago

This is a very odd interpretation of the data that you yourself linked, unless I misread your intention or the data you linked 2018 flu season spent about a month at 5000 excess on this chart. We've spent the last two and half years with a typical floor of 5000 excess, except for April of 2021 and 2022. So over the past two and half years, we've had about two months of time that there are fewer excess deaths than the bad 2018 flu season. I agree we are re-approaching nominal as this surge cools down, but the 2021 data shows that even post vaccine and infection granted immunity surges are liable to happen quickly

tomohawk 4y ago
The graph clearly shows the peak in 2018 at 67,661 on Jan 12. That is a higher level than mid May through to Nov in 2020, as but one example. I'm not sure where the 5000 number you cite comes from. The chart I attempted to show was for the US.

Genbox 4y ago

Excess mortality is not a great measurement for this. Not only is there no clear standard for calculating it across the world, but there are also large errors associated with the data it is calculated from. A lot of models do not take age distribution into account. For example, if you have a "boomer" generation that is transition into a high-risk-of-dying age group, then the projected number of deaths will be low and the deaths high, making it look like you have a lot of excess mortality. Slightly more complex models that project the number of deaths from a larger timeframe (for example 5 years) minimize this kind of error, but there are still many more factors to take into account. EuroMOMO is a European standard for calculating excess mortality. They calculate data variance and thresholds where the model would consider deaths outside of statistical error[1]. Across European 28 countries (420 million people) their model shows[2] a considerable amount of excess deaths in 2020, 2021 and 2022. So according to that model, the pandemic is very much still a present danger. [1] https://www.euromomo.eu/how-it-works/methods/ https://www.euromomo.eu/how-it-works/methods/ [2] https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/