Date: April 26th, 2020 11:04 PM Author: Pearl parlor Subject: all-cause weekly mortality BARELY increased in the US
can anyone explain this? using CDC data, you can prove all-cause weekly mortality nationwide did NOT significantly increase when you compare 2020 numbers to weekly annual averages from the past six years. specifically:
Nationwide, all ages, total mortality for the first 15 weeks of the calendar year for the average of 2013-2019:
846,835
Nationwide, all ages, total mortality for the first 15 weeks of the 2020 calendar year:
848,042
Delta between total mortality for the first 15 weeks of average of 2013-2019 and first 15 weeks of 2020:
Date: April 26th, 2020 11:10 PM Author: Excitant kitty prole
seriously though, outside NYC the number of people who stopped getting into car accidents etc is so large and the percentage of people infected so small that lives saved from lack of car accidents outweighs death from fraudvirus.
i mean, i think there is excess mortality from fraudvirus, but not that much.
Date: April 26th, 2020 11:08 PM Author: Pearl parlor
the numbers get even more odd when you break it down by age groups. cdc tracks three cohorts: under 18, 18-64 (lol), and 65+. So let's determine the percentage increase in all-cause mortality for each cohort, comparing the average weekly mortality for the first 15 weeks of all years 2013-2019 to the first 15 weeks of 2020:
<18: 79% (meaning FEWER people in this cohort died over the same period compared to average)
Date: April 26th, 2020 11:25 PM Author: Pearl parlor
...wait, why? only the 65+ cohort saw any increase in deaths over expected deaths? unless you mean that it meant the lockdowns saved lives... but at that point why don't we just not do anything ever to avoid accidental mortality/other forms of illness
Date: April 26th, 2020 11:10 PM Author: Pearl parlor
Lastly, what if we measure the delta between each cohort identified above? So this is measuring the average number of all-cause deaths across 2013-2019 for the first 15 weeks of the year against the actual all-cause mortality count for the first fifteen weeks of this year:
Date: April 26th, 2020 11:13 PM Author: Excitant kitty prole
yup. the absurd thing is that it demonstrates the absurdity of Cuomo etc's arguments that these measures are justified if they save a single life. they would demonstrably save 40,000+ lives per year just from car accidents. but nobody has argued for a lockdown like this to save those lives, because in the long run it will obviously kill more people, and impoverish and immiserate the living.
Date: April 27th, 2020 12:28 AM Author: electric stead gunner
Car accidents are a shitty comparator because cars have utility that offsets the risk. The virus has negative utility even if it kills only one person.
Date: April 27th, 2020 1:29 AM Author: richard clock (ggtp)
this is a mixed analogy, you would have to compare the benefits of doing away with the lockdown, which are massive economically and mentally, with the additional expected deaths
Date: April 26th, 2020 11:14 PM Author: Pearl parlor
actual, good faith question:
the number of lives saved versus the number of people killed matches precisely enough to have a delta of 1,000 people between lockdown+virus and no-lockdown+no-virus? Even accounting for population growth?
maybe this is right, but this sort of beggars belief to me
Date: April 26th, 2020 11:19 PM Author: Excitant kitty prole
i don't know, it could easily be a coincidence. if the pattern continues for a few more weeks even as virus prevalence rises and falls and states come out of lockdown then i would be surprised.
Date: April 26th, 2020 11:28 PM Author: Marvelous onyx windowlicker range
Isn't the correct comparison no-lockdown+no-virus vs. no-lockdown+virus? The latter situation is what we were trying to avoid. Presumably, if we didn't have the lockdown many, many more people would have gotten sick and died. Also, more people would have died as a result of other non-covid causes.
Date: April 26th, 2020 11:34 PM Author: Pearl parlor
oh totally, but we'll never see that world. i agree that this would be the proper like-vs-like. but there aren't significant cases in most of the non-lockdown state; i checked the data isn't significant i don't think
Date: April 26th, 2020 11:57 PM Author: Marvelous onyx windowlicker range
maybe there would be more cases if people were traveling freely without restriction. virus may very well be fraud but i dont think saying "there's been no increase in death" when we've been living under lock down orders for the last 6 weeks is a convincing argument. maybe i'm missing part of the analysis here, and i'm open to being convinced. i want this shit to end ASAP.
Date: April 27th, 2020 12:03 AM Author: Pearl parlor
i promise i'm not making an argument here. when i first stumbled upon this data on twitter i assumed it couldn't possibly be true. so i rebuilt the numbers directly from the CDC database and... it is. what does it mean? dunno man i'm a dumb attorney
Date: April 27th, 2020 2:37 AM Author: white adulterous institution macaca
There's no evidence that any deaths are being prevented by the lockdown. Even if there are deaths being prevented, they are only being prevented temporarily.
Date: April 27th, 2020 2:46 PM Author: Marvelous onyx windowlicker range
This is an important point if flattening the curve doesn't prevent deaths then why do we think our healthcare system getting "overwhelmed" is worse than an economic depression?
goes to show that measuring deaths simpliciter is a way of tracking well being that really cuts across people's intuitions of what a good life is supposed to be like, of what safety should look like, etc.
Date: April 26th, 2020 11:18 PM Author: Pearl parlor
Week FLU DEATH AVG PNUMONIA DEATH AVG TOTAL DEATH AVG FLU DEATH PNUMONIA DEATH TOTAL DEATH 2020 2020% AVG. FLU 2020% AVG. PNEUM 2020% AVG. DEATH RAW DEATH DELTA
Date: April 26th, 2020 11:52 PM Author: Pearl parlor
okay, we have three partial weeks in april with 100% reporting data (so the first two weeks of april plus the last week of march+first four days of april). these weeks in 2020 had the following percentages of the average numbers of deaths from the same weeks in the preceding six years:
all ages: 2020 deaths were 103%, 111%, and 104% of same-week deaths from averaged prior six years
<18: 2020 deaths were 64%, 57%, 43% of same-week deaths from averaged prior six years
18-64: 2020 deaths were 98%, 102%, 88% of same-week deaths from averaged prior six years
65+: 2020 deaths were 106%, 117%, 111% of same-week deaths from averaged prior six years
especially considering this doesn't adjust for population increase, this seems like a minimal increase.
for the sake of argument, if we took the delta of all deaths from just those three weeks, averaged out the delta from those three weeks with the intent to capture the "peak," and multiplied the average of those numbers by 52 (considering most people think we're a year away from a vaccine), the result is: 168,844 more deaths than we'd otherwise have in the same period
Date: April 27th, 2020 5:17 PM Author: Mahogany Comical Tanning Salon Nibblets
Yes. If you look at locations that have been hit hard by corona, all-cause mortality is through the roof.
"More than 27,000 New Yorkers have died since the start of the novel coronavirus outbreak in March — 20,900 more than would be expected over this period and thousands more than have been captured by official coronavirus death statistics."
Date: April 28th, 2020 1:59 PM Author: Pearl parlor
So we agree that the first of March is the relevant date? ok. so here's the all-cause mortality data for NYC from march 1 through april 18 (so that's week 10 through week 16). the reason i picked those dates are because those are the only weeks the CDC will certify complete data for. so here you go, delta-on-delta:
week 10 delta of all-cause mortality over average from the last 6 years:
1
week 11:
17
week 12:
324
week 13:
1564
week 14:
4298
week 15:
4831
week 16:
1765
first, i don't understand how the NYT reached a delta of 20,900 - i see a delta of 12,799. now maybe we should be gracious and assume that between april 16-april 27 (the publication date of the article) we saw 8,000 more deaths. but that would mean the pace is accelerating... and i'd ask how they reach that calculation considering the CDC isn't yet able to certify that result.
but forget that. the average weekly deaths over average during the period of time the NYT selected equals 1828 more deaths per week. i'm not arguing that isn't significant as hell. but i want clarity.
so let's annualize the peak. if we take the peak total all-cause mortality death of NYC for the period selected by the NYT, we get 149,760 deaths. what amount of deaths would we expect to see? 57,564. NYC population is 8,399,000. so:
Date: April 27th, 2020 7:30 AM Author: Bonkers ruddy public bath
Super strange that a 75% decline in cancer diagnoses, an increase in child abuse and neglect, an increase in domestic violence, an increase in obesity from a sedentary lifestyle, an increase in depression, haven't all manifested themselves as deaths this month!
Date: April 27th, 2020 7:58 AM Author: Pearl parlor
idgi.
we’ve been told 50k deaths from COVID so far. But our mitigation measures reduced ALL other deaths by 49k?
def possible but seems strange. seems like occham’s razor is that we’re recharacterizing other types of death as COVID deaths, but I’m looking for reasons to disprove that hypothesis. Do u have one?
Date: April 29th, 2020 10:26 AM Author: Dashing corner
Grandma in nursing home with dementia catches a simple flu last year, she never even gets tested for flu and her death is recorded as dementia. This year she is definitely tested for Covid and her death is recorded as such
John Burn-Murdoch, Valentina Romei and Chris Giles in London yesterday
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The death toll from coronavirus may be almost 60 per cent higher than reported in official counts, according to an FT analysis of overall fatalities during the pandemic in 14 countries.
Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across these locations, considerably higher than the 77,000 official Covid-19 deaths reported for the same places and time periods.
If the same level of under-reporting observed in these countries was happening worldwide, the global Covid-19 death toll would rise from the current official total of 201,000 to as high as 318,000.
To calculate excess deaths, the FT has compared deaths from all causes in the weeks of a location’s outbreak in March and April 2020 to the average for the same period between 2015 and 2019. The total of 122,000 amounts to a 50 per cent rise in overall mortality relative to the historical average for the locations studied.
In all the countries analysed except Denmark, excess deaths far outnumbered the official coronavirus death tolls. The accuracy of official death statistics from the virus is limited by how effectively a country is testing people to confirm cases. Some countries, including China, have retrospectively revised up their death tolls from the disease.
A chart showing how deaths from all causes have shot up in countries across the world during Covid-19 outbreaks
According to the FT analysis, overall deaths rose 60 per cent in Belgium, 51 per cent in Spain, 42 per cent in the Netherlands and 34 per cent in France during the pandemic compared with the same period in previous years.
Some of these deaths may be the result of causes other than Covid-19, as people avoid hospitals for other ailments. But excess mortality has risen most steeply in places suffering the worst Covid-19 outbreaks, suggesting most of these deaths are directly related to the virus rather than simply side-effects of lockdowns.
Editor’s note
The Financial Times is making key coronavirus coverage free to read to help everyone stay informed. Find the latest here.
David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk at Cambridge university, said the daily counts in the UK, for instance, were “far too low” because they only accounted for hospital deaths.
“The only unbiased comparison you can make between different countries is by looking at all cause mortality . . . There are so many questions about the rise we’ve seen in death that have not got Covid on the death certificate, yet you feel are inevitably linked in some way to this epidemic.”
The extra deaths are most pronounced in urban areas with the worst virus outbreaks, and have completely overwhelmed reporting mechanisms in some. This is especially worrying for many emerging economies, where total excess mortality is orders of magnitude higher than official coronavirus fatalities.
In Ecuador’s Guayas province, just 245 official Covid-related deaths were reported between March 1 and April 15, but data on total deaths show that about 10,200 more people died during this period than in a typical year — an increase of 350 per cent.
A chart showing how deaths from all causes have more-than-doubled in many cities worldwide during Covid-19 outbreaks
In the northern Italian region of Lombardy, the heart of Europe’s worst outbreak, there are more than 13,000 excess deaths in the official statistics for the nearly 1,700 municipalities for which data is available. This is an uptick of 155 per cent on the historical average and far higher than the 4,348 reported Covid deaths in the region.
The region surrounding the Italian city of Bergamo registered the worst increase internationally with a 464 per cent rise in deaths above normal levels, followed by New York City with a 200 per cent increase, and Madrid, Spain, with a 161 per cent increase.
In the Indonesian capital Jakarta, data on burials shows an increase of 1,400 relative to the historical average during the same period — 15 times the official figure of 90 Covid deaths for the same period.
The challenge is not confined to the developing world. In England and Wales, the number of fatalities in the week ending April 10 was the highest this century. The figure was 76 per cent higher than the average for the same week in the past five years, and the number of excess deaths was 58 per cent higher than the total number of reported Covid-deaths for the same period.
“If we want to . . . [understand] the ways different countries have responded to the surging pandemic and how [it] has affected the health of the population, the best way is to count excess deaths,” said David Leon, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Experts have warned of serious under-reporting of Covid-19 cases in residential facilities for the elderly, who are particularly vulnerable to the virus. “Very few countries appear to be testing people in care homes, staff and residents, systematically,” said Adelina Comas-Herrera, research fellow at the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre of the London School of Economics.
Even the much higher numbers of deaths in the pandemic suggested by excess mortality statistics are likely to be conservative, as lockdowns mean that “mortality from numerous conditions such as traffic accidents and occupational injuries possibly went down”, said Markéta Pechholdová, assistant professor of demography at the University of Economics, Prague.
Date: April 27th, 2020 4:11 PM Author: Magical greedy menage
LOL at trying to manipulate January data to support this argument. Try this one that shows a totally random unaccounted for spike in deaths as the pandemic ramps up. Soooooo random!
Date: April 28th, 2020 2:39 PM Author: Pearl parlor
ok. so let's take a bad state (not NYC, discussed above) and do a deep dive. michigan is near and dear to my heart (go blue!) and MI is one of the states worst ravaged by COVID. so let's look at all-cause mortality data.
michigan only has COMPLETE cdc data available between march 1 - april 11. that's a weakness, and ill update. so its not as good as NYC. but this period of time has a raw death delta of 1617 (so that's all-cause mortality in that period compared with all-cause mortality for the same period over the averaged last six years). we'd normally see 11,603 deaths during this time, but we saw 13,220.
okay so let's do an annualization delta. we'll assume the peak of deaths carried forward for a whole year. to determine this delta, i'm actually going to be generous and narrow the peak only to the WORST part of the peak, so, to be clear, i'm being highly conservative to capture only the three worst death weeks in MI. so going forward, we're talking march 22 - april 11.
average weekly death delta: 533
multiplied as if peak applied to year: 27,716 more deaths than average year
so in a normal year, MI would see 99,684 deaths.
in a hypothetical peak-COVID all year year, MI would see 127,400 deaths.
MI has 9,987,000 residents. turned into percentages, that means in a normal year, 0.9% of all residents die. in a COVID-peak year, 1.2% of all residents die
This is directly comparing average of three previous years week with a given week.
Only 3 weeks are "above average," March 28 (102%), April 4 (113%) and April 11 (115%).
It's also clear this is a New York City problem (209% for 2/104/25), they're basically single-handedly raising the death rate. NJ and NY are fucked, too. Everything else is literally a rounding error. (Asterisk about it takes 8 weeks to get in death certificates blah blah blah)
this is a good find, but i don't think this is the tool we want for two reasons. first, they "weight" the data to try to account for information gaps. this is very strange considering they certify their own data is entirely complete for those weeks included in my stats. and this makes a big difference - look at the disparity when you sort by weighted and unweighted amounts
second, they are using running totals but aren't accounting for any group in which there is LOWER than average mortality. in other words, if you have a "negative excess" death amount in a subcategory, that amount is reported as zero. and that's a big problem given that certain groups have way negative death rates (sort by age in my data!)
these are simply MY personal gloss, so consult the numbers yourself. but here's what i think the numbers may show:
- the impact of this pandemic has so far been HEAVILY localized in terms of mortality impact. the overall balance of the pandemic's effect on mortality nationwide has been slightly - and i do mean slightly - positive. but it's a barely cognizable bump.
- this was no joke in NYC. NYC got wrecked, full stop. conservative media is ignoring this. that might be a sign for the future of the country, but we also need to recognize NYC is just categorically a different type of living experience than just about anywhere else in the country. we're acting like NYC is everywhere, it is not, but that doesn't mean it won't be in the future...
- ...but michigan's data kind of makes me doubt it. michigan was selected as a state because i'm from there, but also because it was pretty universally recognized as a state impacted disproportionately to its population. when you tear into the numbers, however, you can find that the overall increase in mortality has been extremely slight across the state. MI's mortality also appears to have peaked, so the worst is over.
- we have no idea how to categorize CAUSE of death. i think that "COVID-19 DEATH" statistics are useless. witness: the bizarre jitter in the weeks leading up to COVID when physicians were trying to categorize flu or pneumonia deaths. each physician was just looking at the bodies in front of them, and the aggregate was that we were seeing enormous spikes in "pneumonia" or "flu" deaths. news flash (which, to be fair, we could only see in retrospect) they were COVID deaths, we just didn't know it yet.
- liberal media is selectively choosing states with the bad impact to try to illustrate that all of their selected interventions were worth it. look at the NYT excess mortality stat page. they happened to select the eight or nine jurisdictions that have a positive mortality balance. guess what nationwide it's almost even with average.
- other measures of excess mortality reporting have nonsense cooked into them, which is how you're getting these reports that the COVID death rate is underreported. horseshit. look at the CDC's excess mortality measurement tool (which surprisingly appeared two weeks ago... hmm) which doesn't agree with their own general universal mortality data. why? look at their measurement methodology.
- the age distribution is insane. drakemallard is right about one thing - if you have a teen or young child you're putting them at way, way more risk doing whatever it is that you stopped doing when we were on quarantine. the rate of 0-17 mortality has dropped like a stone. we're literally seeing HALF as many people in this age group die as normal... which isn't surprising because suicide is harder when the entire family is at home, and accidents are more difficult when you can't play at the house where ricky's dad doesn't lock up his guns
- the 18-64 age distribution also needs to be trumpeted from the hilltops. this group is basically at baseline...
- but we're also minimizing the impact this has had on people 65+. they are citizens too. what happened in our nation's nursing homes WAS a disgrace.
Date: May 11th, 2020 11:59 AM Author: Pearl parlor
your post sucks. "haven't we always known this???"
no. not if you are one of hundreds of millions of americans who (1) rely on the NYT for news or (2) rely on infowars for news or (3) are in a political bubble where statistics are cherry-picked to prove that we either are living in a fascist superstate or should be locked in our homes until we're all dead from non-COVID causes
new data - seems like we're getting big time mortality improvements. also added FL and CO. both are interesting because they show increased mortality, but both are complicated because they also have significant (8%) population growth over the averaged period.
Date: May 11th, 2020 1:59 PM Author: shaky rebellious marketing idea
Because it has a median age of 84, more than 2/3rds from nursing homes, and has a transsexual Shitlib as the head of the department of health? Shocking.
Date: May 11th, 2020 12:30 PM Author: Pearl parlor
omg, updated to make some per capita adjustments. CO and FL are also flat. link is updated.
takeaways -
per capita to date, we would normally see one death out of every 341.48 people nationwide. this year, we have seen one death out of every 349.13 people. so it's slightly LESS common to die this year nationwide than any other year.
per capita to date, we would normally see one death out of every 298.81 michiganders. this year, we have seen one death out of every 282.16. so it's slightly more common to die as a michigan resident this year than in any other year.
as i suspected, CO and FL's rates of excess mortality are mostly explained by their increased population. here is the same comparison as above in CO and FL:
- CO would expect 1 death per 429.79 people, this year has had 1 death per 399.50 people
- FL would expect 1 death per 305.35 people, this year has had 1 death per 305.16 people (so basically identical mortality over average)
but now look at NYC... would normally expect 1 death per 426.64 people, but have seen to date 1 death out of every 251.96 people!!!
Date: May 11th, 2020 4:57 AM Author: charismatic spot
Preliminary vital death statistics released by state health officials show that Pennsylvania recorded 49,384 total deaths from any cause through the end of April 2020. During the same time span last year, the state recorded just 46,521 deaths.
Experts attributed this year’s increase almost entirely to the impact of COVID-19.
Date: May 11th, 2020 11:57 AM Author: razzmatazz kitchen cumskin
everyone's gunna ask for their state, but can we see a state that was minimally impacted (like oh say Texas)? in case the red state govs ARE hiding the impact?
Date: May 11th, 2020 1:56 PM Author: charismatic spot
"New York City had four times the number of deaths as expected during its Covid-19 outbreak, according to a new study, including thousands of excess deaths that may not be attributed directly to the virus but to its effect on the health-care system, city services and other factors. From March 11 to May 2, there were a total of 32,107 deaths, 24,172 more that the city would have expected..."
they claim their numbers are from the CDC. but so are mine, taken directly from their published databases. their number of excess mortality deaths differ from mine. how could this be?
answer: i dunno, but it has to be the model. look at their definition of how they claim they arrived at "excess all-cause deaths":
"Total excess all-cause deaths were calculated as observed deaths minus expected deaths as determined by a seasonal regression model using mortality data from the period January 1, 2015-May 2, 2020."
we'd need to look at their model for clues. but we can't see it. you CAN see how mine works because the spreadsheet is transparent. hmm.
"there were a total of 32,107 deaths, 24,172 more that the city would have expected." um, what?
their data on total deaths - 32,107
my data on total deaths - 31,895
okay that seems pretty close. so where's the problem?
their claim about "expected deaths" to this point - 7,935 (which i arrive at by subtracting the claimed excess from the total)
actual data on expected deaths to this point by prior years:
2015 - 20,133
2016 - 19,438
2017 - 19,431
2018 - 20,167
2019 - 19,285
what in the ACTUAL hell? this was either a really, really sloppy error or intentionally misrepresenting prior year mortality to make the excess number higher.
EDIT: and look, i found out why -
"From March 11 to May 2, there were a total of 32,107 deaths, 24,172 more that the city would have expected in that time based on past trends, according to a report from New York’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene that was published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
WRONG. that's the total from January 1 to May 2, not from March 11 to May 2. meanwhile, the total of the expected deaths between march 11 and may 2? 8,349.
so what's the answer? they compared the actual deaths from january 1 to may 2 against the expected deaths between march 11 and may 2. lol.
the bloomberg article cited above DOUBLED the excess mortality claim. they did this by measuring january-may actual 2020 deaths against the deaths expected between march-may as determined from historical norms, but claiming both values came from march-may.
oh yes, and i don't want that point to get lost. NYC was WRECKED by this disease. please don't assume that i'm some infowars conspiracy duder, but i do believe we're in the middle of an information war between the two sides.
plus, the actual number is WORSE than you say - my CDC-backed calcs say we have excess mortality of 13347 new york city residents. holy shit
i'm positive it had SOME impact. the question is how this data should tailor our activity moving forward. i think three easy steps might be for us to:
- begin treating different areas of the country differently (and acknowledging that they probably deserve different treatment);
- begin treating people over the age of 65 as presumptive COVID cases today and building up a social safety net sufficient to actually, you know, stop them from dying by the dozen of thousands; and
- lessen restrictions on younger individuals, who have extremely remote risk of dying from the virus but whose economic activity has been seriously hampered by sheltering restrictions.
one way or another, though, bloomberg articles like this one aren't helping. just my two cents
Date: May 11th, 2020 4:13 PM Author: charismatic spot
Or wait for the vaccine. Elderly can't be separated from the rest of society. What about planning for a half-lockdown over the next 12 months and schedule monthly UBI payments to every person?