The Economist tracks excess deaths

Re:The Economist tracks excess deaths by StephenJGL on Monday December 27, 2021 @05:01PM (#29707348)

It's possible that lockdown didn't reduce deaths. Excess deaths is a tricky stat because it contains so much underlying confounding inputs that all you know is that more people died than what you expected based on historical averages and that is --all-- you can get from it reliably.

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Re:The Economist tracks excess deaths by cm2187 on Monday December 27, 2021 @05:22PM (#29707536)

Yeah I would look for “medical” deaths (as opposed to crime, suicides and accidents) as the metric to compare to covid deaths. Not sure if that data is widely available.

The other thing to add to the mix of ups and downs is that the demographic of covid deaths is overly people with a short life expectancy so I would expect 2021 excess deaths to be reduced by the 2020 covid deaths that would have died in 2021 otherwise.

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Re:The Economist tracks excess deaths by 8ytecoder on Monday December 27, 2021 @05:39PM (#29707734)

I agree with this. I think that would be a measure of the direct impact and as long as it also factors in all types of medical deaths. I personally know people who died waiting for a hospital bed for completely unrelated stuff.

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Re:The Economist tracks excess deaths by lostlogin on Monday December 27, 2021 @05:56PM (#29707939)

But what about places where less people died than normal?

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