What went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted

Re:What went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted by sampo on Monday June 12, 2023 @07:39PM (#36303004)

Due to large numbers of immigration, Sweden has younger population than comparable nearby countries. Too many excess death analyses just take the average of 5 previous years (2015-2019) as the baseline, to compare yearly or weekly deaths to. But in countries with ageing population, number of yearly deaths have been on a slowly increasing linear trend already for a long time. If you ignore the trend, and only compare to the 2015-2019 average, all countries with ageing population would show continuously increasing excess deaths.

Also, Sweden has a peculiar bookkeeping system, and a surprisingly large number of deaths are recorded without precisely known date. If you only look at weekly death statistics, you will miss the "week 99" deaths from the yearly total.

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Re:What went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted by gmarx on Tuesday June 13, 2023 @12:48PM (#36313013)

All valid things to check but would also need to be checked for other OECD countries. I would not assume the OECD methodology does not take account of the aging. Also I would not assume this had much of an effect. The way it might would be if a lot of younger people moved to Sweden during the pandemic . In general cross border movement slowed during that time

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Re:What went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted by sampo on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @04:58AM (#36323256)

> I would not assume the OECD methodology does not take account of the aging.

And here you would assume very wrong.

OECD does indeed estimate excess mortality simply by comparing to the 2015-2019 averages:

"The expected number of deaths is based on the average number of deaths for the same week over recent years (in this case the previous five years, 2015-19). This baseline could be considered a lower estimate of the expected number of deaths since both population growth and an ageing population would be expected to push up the number of deaths observed each year."

"Importantly, given the impact of COVID-19 to the overall number of weekly deaths in 2020, the average deaths for the period 2015-2019 continues to be used to calculate excess deaths in 2021, and still applies as the base for 2022 and 2023 excess deaths."

From their: Methodology_All-cause-Excess-and-COVID-19-deaths_OECD.pdf

Which you can find from https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676 when you try to find their notes for methodology.

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Re:What went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted by sampo on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @05:20AM (#36323402)

> Also I would not assume this had much of an effect.

Also here you are assuming somewhat wrong.

For Finland, the 2015–2019 average annual deaths is 53723. 2022 deaths were 63219. Thus the simple, OECD-style, estimate for excess mortality is 9496.

Whereas an age-structured model from Statistics Finland estimated 56158 deaths for 2022 from pre-covid trends. So the age-structure-aware excess mortality estimate is 7061 for 2022 for Finland.

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