I would not go so far as to support anyone claiming this is why we should be breaking quarantine, but can’t quite support racking them all up as COVID deaths either. Reality is somewhere between the two (but close to “most” than “few”)
If the purpose of the analysis is to determine whether the preventive measure is effective and not overwrought, an excess deaths analysis is a good one because it helps infer what the toll would be in absence of the measure.
If the purpose is to attribute cause of death, it’s just a heuristic. But a useful one when other methodologies are (rightly or wrongly) suspect.
The pattern is very clear and obvious, and not at all what you would expect if the primary cause were just something to do with being in lockdown.
We combine excess mortality with other stats.
One of the reasons excess mortality has attracted so much attention is because there are a bunch of people saying that covid just isn't killing many people and we point to the pile of corpses and ask "what happened to them then?"
In some places, there are apparently many fewer people dying from the flu, because, well, we're isolated from one another!
Similarly, fewer car accidents. Suicides are probably altered, as well as violence in some cases, in particular domestic violence.
People forgoing treatments for any host of disease due to either fear of going to the clinic, or delayed treatments.
etc..
This lead many residents to die of neglect, or for COVID to sweep easily through many centres if the remaining staff worked whilst symptomatic and took shifts across multiple locations.
This is part of the reason why countries in EE and the FSU, as well as those with less strict lockdowns (ie. Sweden), had lower mortality rates than in places like the UK, Spain, Italy, France.
It might be worth reconsidering the whole aged care model, and advancing the idea of voluntary euthanasia for the elderly.
Sure, but their deaths can be attributed to lockdowns. And when the vaccine is out, their deaths will probably be attributed to the vaccine.
Measuring excess mortality is not going to convince a covid denialist.
So take a look what this guy found out: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=240767
Firstly, it's nonsense to take "average amount of deaths" over the past few years and extrapolate it to the current year without accounting for population growth changes, and rate of population growth acceleration.
Secondly, if you look at the "expected U.S. Death Rate" data[1], it shows that they expected U.S. death rates (per capita) to rapidly accelerate about 7 years ago, but the rate of deaths didn't really begin that acceleration cycle until ~2 years ago:
2017: 858.0 deaths per 100,000 predicted
2018: 868.5 deaths per 100,000 predicted
2019: 878.2 deaths per 100,000 predicted
2020: 888.0 deaths per 100,000 predicted
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2017: 731.9 actual deaths per 100,000 [2]
2018: 723.6 actual deaths per 100,000 [3]
2019: 867.8 actual deaths per 100,000 [4]
2020: Could be anywhere between 835-910 depending on the population data and total death numbers you use to calculate
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Not sure why people aren't dying as fast as they initially thought (probably modern medicine, etc), but that simply means there were more old people on the verge of dying coming into 2020. So even if 2020 shows a per-capita increase in deaths, it's to be expected.
[1] - https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat... [2] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf [3] - https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/death-rate-per-100... [4] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
U.S. deaths this year are well above that curve: https://imgur.com/p4kBgXF
We are on track to have 3.2 million to 3.3 million deaths this year. That's a crude death rate of 970 to 1000 deaths per, well above the megatrends (U.N.) forecast of 888.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
- Longest and strictest lockdown in G20 countries.
- Quality health records, low COVID deaths (as they were aiming to eradicate COVID risk altogether).
Factors difficult to adjust for would be the relatively high (compared to other countries) levels of economic support provided by Australia to those in lockdown, easing rent and utility bill concerns, etc.
Not all lockdowns are equal, after all.
Here is the graph I got: https://imgur.com/N4lSSam
The drop-off at the end is because of reporting lag. There is more of a drop-off with these than other causes, presumably because producing a final death certificate takes more time on average (forensic autopsies, toxicology testing, etc.).
Through week 35, there were about 13,000 more non-natural cause deaths in 2020 over 2019.
By comparison, the number of excess deaths through week 35 was 258,846. That implies that 95% of the excess deaths were natural causes.
Here are some spreadsheets I've made from CDC data:
[1] Weekly counts of deaths by select causes [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1G31ODc4eVgzg7etmcCV5...
[2] US Deaths by Week and Year [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qucznpabG1aUz0GSiDbi...
[3] U.S. Excess deaths by age [3] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rcGoWRsNxS_zJQ3pJtbW...
All the previous findings were that COVID is _extremely unlikely_ to kill you if you are under 50, and pretty unlikely-ish under 70 -- so where are these deaths coming from?
It shows the point melolife made, that the percent excess (excess deaths as percent of expected) can be high, but the expected number is fairly low, so the total number of deaths is still relatively small.
The data is from November 9, so not up to date.
That was first wave data. Second wave data has shown that the risk for younger people is higher than we thought.
I don't think this explains all that increase though.
Each hemisphere uses data collected during the winter in the other hemisphere to guess what Influenza variants will be most common in their countries when it's their turn, then it takes several months to turn those guesses into bulk vaccine for immunising the elderly and vulnerable and give them a jab. Sometimes the guess is right on the money and it's extremely effective, other years not so much.
Less signal may make this year's winter 2020/21 vaccine less effective.
Oh thats why some years it seems to work, others not, TIL.
I would be curious to know how many Americans died in 2020, once the year concludes.
(Note that this data includes the last 3 days of 2019.)
But even with the incomplete count, we have already surpassed 2018 and 2019.
It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, but it looks we're on track to have 3.2 million to 3.3 million deaths this year. We won't have a firm grasp on the numbers until March.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-cumulati...
There have been 2,000 - 3,000 known US Covid-19 deaths per day for the past few days. So, devastatingly, I think that number has gone up a lot since October 25.
US life expectancy was lower in 2019 than it was in 2013. Pretty unprecedented outside of things like the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's probably a bigger issue than the pandemic long term.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44846.pdf
"Their most relevant finding for Social Security reform is that life expectancy increased continuously with income and that, according to them, “[t]here was no dividing line above or below which higher income was not associated with higher life expectancy.” At increasingly higher levels of income, they report that an increase in income of a given dollar amount produced positive but smaller gains in life expectancy. "
Graphs and analysis as well.
The 65-and-older population in the US grew by over a third (34.2% or 13,787,044) during the past decade, and by 3.2% (1,688,924) from 2018 to 2019. The world is aging in all of the countries reported in this study.
The peeks in March are interesting.
Given that we didn't have Covid this January, Jan 2021 would be horrifying
If you're thinking absolute terms rather than excess deaths you're probably looking at Northern Hemisphere countries, so January is Winter, which is associated with higher death rates, but you'll see a different pattern in the South because their Winter is six months offset from ours.
Yes this means countries like Australia and New Zealand may well have already experienced the worst of COVID-19 in June-July-August 2020 while the worst in the US or England might be next month, and yes given that they've seen very few deaths while we have thousands every day that's extremely bad news.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
I’m not a fan of the automatic rescaling and truncating of the y-axis on charts by the original link. It is associated with a “lying with statistics” attack on the meaning of the graph. The CDC graphs don’t suffer from that problem.
Measuring excess mortality in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic
Provisional deaths data for measuring changes in patterns of mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic and recovery period. Released 25/11/2020
https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-excess-mortality-a...
