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Maybe _you_ can’t but this is well studied and robust. Do you also disagree with excess death calculations from the pandemic?
by GildedIgel 3y ago
Maybe _you_ can’t but this is well studied and robust.
Do you also disagree with excess death calculations from the pandemic?
- pfannkuchen 3y agoI actually did find the excess death calculations to be questionable. The formula for expected deaths I saw used in the media was “the average of the last 5 years of deaths”. That seems like an incredible oversimplification. Population growth and age demographic trends alone would cause the actual expected deaths to trend upwards over time, and not capturing that would make this formula underestimate expected deaths (and therefore overestimate excess deaths). I did not see this problem addressed anywhere, did anyone else?
- gattilorenz 3y agoThat very much depends on the source. Look at our world in data’s formula [1], and you will see it does take into account that 2020 won’t have the same death as 2019, by using a linear model with previous years. Sure, there might be a sudden and expected increase in population growth (and especially in the 70+ people), but one would have to have to explain how that happened… [1] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid#what-is-excess-mortality https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid#what-is-ex...
- GildedIgel 3y agoIt’s an oversimplification in the media, this is a time series analysis esp. at the macro level. Then you do some fancy math and estimate the counter factual -> the delta between observed and estimated is your excess mortality. Google has a tool for doing this called CausalImpact (available as an R & Python library if you want to play with a tool that can do this analysis).
- HWR_14 3y agoThanks for the tool recommendation.