As I’ve repeated ad nauseum here at the Daily Sceptic, excess mortality provides a far better measure of the pandemic’s impact on mortality than the ‘official’ Covid death rate.
When it comes to cross-country comparisons, the ‘official’ Covid death rates are particularly deficient. Testing and diagnosis vary dramatically, so two countries with the same actual death tolls may still have very different ‘official’ death tolls – just because one tested more or had broader criteria for diagnosis.
Excess mortality, as most readers are no-doubt aware, is the difference between the number of deaths observed during the pandemic and the number that were expected, based on previous years. A five-year average is often used for the number of expected deaths – though one can use a linear trend or more complicated extrapolation instead.
Here’s a very simple example. Suppose a country had roughly 100,000 deaths per year in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. Then in 2020, it records 120,000 deaths. In that case, excess mortality would be 20,000 deaths.
But of course, if we want to compare this country to other countries, the ‘20,000 deaths’ isn’t very useful. Larger countries will have more excess deaths just because there are more people at risk of death. And this is something we need to account for when making comparisons, or else we’ll conclude that all the small countries did well and all the large ones did badly.
So why not just divide the ‘20,000 deaths’ figure by the country’s population, thereby obtaining ‘excess deaths per 100,000 people’? Indeed, that’s exactly what the WHO did for its recent estimates of excess deaths associated with the pandemic (which were widely covered in the media).
Well, there’s a problem with this method of adjustment: countries have different age structures. And this matters because the risk of death (from both Covid and everything else) is far higher in older age-groups than in younger age-groups.
Consider two countries with the same number of excess deaths, say 20,000. One has a population of 10 million and one has a population of 12 million. Suppose the 2 million ‘extra’ people in the second country are all under the age of 40. So above the age of 40, the two countries have identical age structures.
Using the WHO’s method of adjustment, excess mortality would be 200 per 100,000 in the first country, but only 167 per 100,000 in the second country. Yet this clearly ‘rewards’ the second country. Why? Very few deaths occur among people under 40, so including them in the denominator artificially pulls down the rate of excess mortality.
Rather than dividing by the country’s population, there’s a much better way of making excess mortality figures comparable: divide by the number of expected deaths. This gives you a percentage, which is neither biased against large countries, nor against countries with aging populations.
As a matter of fact, the WHO’s decision to divide by the country’s population may help to explain its widely-reported (but almost certainly wrong) finding that Britain had less excess mortality than Germany. Estimates based on percentages clearly show that Britain had more excess mortality. Yet because Germany’s population pyramid has a narrower base, the denominator in the WHO’s calculation will have been smaller.
Having said that, I doubt the WHO’s estimates are substantially different from those based on percentages. But that’s not the point. The point is they used a bad method of adjustment, when an equally simple and better one was available.
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When, in March 2020, we were told to stay at home etc. because there was a deadly virus coming – nay, already upon us – I thought to myself,
“Well, Joe, if this is true, then I need to start planning some serious stuff to protect myself and my wife and my two children from death and/or the zombie hoards. This stuff could be very costly. So before I embark upon such costly activities, I should first do some basic checks for myself to ascertain whether what I am being told is as bad as they say it is.”
I checked whether the number of people dying every day, which were being reported as if they were something exceptional, were indeed exceptional.
Two minutes of basic research and primary school arithmetic told me the numbers were quite normal.
So I did nothing. And here we are. And so is everyone else.
That’s what amazed me at the time and continues to do so – why didn’t everyone do these basic checks?
Indeed. Not only did I do nothing, I carried on completely as normal. Didn’t change a thing.
Military Genius is being able to stand in the middle doing the ordinary thing while everyone else runs around doing stupid things. Or something like that. Think it was Napoleon who said that.
…yep…no one I know has died ‘of’ Covid…and that’s likely true for the vast majority…but I wish I had a pound for all the people who ‘know’ that to be true, because all of their family friends and acquaintances are alive and kicking…but who still trot out
”but 6 million people have died!” ……..
It is quite interesting to ask a committed covidian two questions: one is, what is the fatality rate of covid, and the other is, what percentage of the population died of covid. The answer I generally get back is the same guess for both, at 10%. This is people who get all their info from the BBC, who never made any effort to disabuse people of such insane ideas.
I was helping out on a training course on Saturday. The lead instructor started his welcome speech with:
“As far as I am concerned we are still in the middle of a pandemic…”
FFS!
Give me strength.
An ex teacher BTW.
WTF was he supposed to training? Blind idiocy?
Ex teacher, left wing, BBC watcher and listener and basically still thinks like a school child.
A real PIA.
This amounts to an admission that there was never a pandemic. It’s basically an assertion that nothing has materially changed since March 2020, ie, that the situation we’re facing now is not better than the situation we were facing then. By that time, it was claimed that only Corona measures could prevent an apocalypse and somewhat later, that only implementing them had prevented it. At the moment, an apocalypse is certainly not occuring and there are also no generally enforced Corona measures anymore. But if we’re in the same situation we were in in March 2020 and an apocalypse isn’t happening despite what supposedly saved the day back then doesn’t exist anymore, it can’t really have saved the day.
Excellent. Thanks for that.
“And so is everyone else.”
Well not exactly. The Midazolam outrage has been considered responsible for many deaths and the injections are steadily killing even more, and will continue to do so.
Too true, Huxley
I often pointed out to people in Spring 2020 that, each day in the UK, at least approx 460 people die of cancer and another 460 or so die of heart disease, (let alone all the other deaths) which made ‘covid deaths’ insignificant. Oh how I was shouted down and told I was wrong, yet one minute online will give you these figures. I must admit, I found them surprising, but like you, the whole thing just didn’t sit right with me. At the time I couldn’t believe the obfuscation and though perhaps the covid figures were an error of communication by the government. Of course, I know better now!
The response I got from apparently otherwise intelligent people, when I said that the numbers of people dying was really very ordinary and explained my simple arithmetic, was:
“Oh, Joe, I suppose this is from one of your QAnon mates…”
Up until that point, I had never heard of QAnon.
You know you’ve won the argument when people resort to that kind of thing – “conspiracy theorist” “anti-vaxxer” “literally Hitler” “that’s what Trump says” etc.
Thinking of putting it on my LinkedIn page…
March 2020 to present: Science-Denier, Granny-Killer, Conspiracy Theorist, Anti-Vaxxer but Pro-Vacciner and All Round Selfish Bad Guy
All-cause excess mortality may be better than “covid deaths” but the waters have been muddied by neglect of the frail, reduced access to healthcare, enormous social and economic disruption to people’s lives, and the mass “vaccination” of an experimental, novel and not fully tested medical treatment.
When I was a kid I used to feel sorry for lab rats and thought I hope I come back as a lab rat, so far so good. I met a lot of neighbours out ad about muzzled up for the ‘plague’ who looked at me as if I was mad, showing a full face, they’ve never asked how I survived.
I hope I DON’T come back as a lab rat!!!!
The problem with excess mortality now is that we also need to factor in the excess mortality as a consequence of lockdown. This will get worse for some time yet as the NHS struggles to clear the backlog. For example, a 45 year old individual who dies of cancer that could have been saved had they not received the message to stay home, save lives back in 2020/21 and therefore didn’t present for diagnosis until it was too late, would be an excess death that is purely a factor of lockdown and not Covid. I would posit that right now excess death are more a product of lockdown than covid and have been for several months at least.
I would argue (as a layman granted, so feel free to tell me why I am wrong) that the best comparison would be excess deaths in the respiratory diseases category alone. Whilst there might be non-respiratory deaths that are a direct result of Covid (cardiac or organ failure spring to mind) I would expect that the presence of the respiratory disease is at least acknowledged as a contributing factor and therefore reportable as such.
Admittedly the standard of classification will likely vary in different countries but it is an aim of the WHO to drive standardisation so they should be able to tell the reliable sources from the unreliable ones and report accordingly.
I agree in part but as long as the presence of “covid” is enough to make it a “respiratory disease death” (covid is supposedly a respiratory disease) then we’re looking at skewed data. You really need to look at underlying causes AND adjust for QALYs lost. My guess is that a lot more QALYs are being lost because of non-covid deaths than “covid”.
It would require some way of removing the ‘with covid’ from the ‘from covid’ or ‘contributed by covid’ granted. A person unfortunate enough to be run over by a bus whilst in possession of a positive test is clearly a misclassification, but would covid be on the death certificate in a case like that?
Granted however that’s a very obvious case and there will be many shades of grey where covid is added as a secondary cause when it’s debatable if it really was or not. And there is no likely possibility of ever solving that mystery now either.
“I would argue (as a layman granted, so feel free to tell me why I am wrong) that the best comparison would be excess deaths in the respiratory diseases category alone. Whilst there might be non-respiratory deaths that are a direct result of Covid (cardiac or organ failure spring to mind) I would expect that the presence of the respiratory disease is at least acknowledged as a contributing factor and therefore reportable as such.”
This all depends on several factors:
a) cause(s) of death as in section 1 of the death certificate
b) contributory cause(s)/comorbidities in section 2 of the death certificate
c) the coding applied at diagnosis according to the WHO International Classification of Disease. In 2020 this was issue 10 and had CoViD19 shoe horned in, in 2021 issue 11 came out and as far as I can remember is totally different to issue 10.
Yes I didn’t factor in that something that sounds simple – i.e. classification of the death – can actually be a very complex thing. But I thought the role of the WHO (aside from pushing the CCP narrative) was to ensure data quality through standardisation.
A struck off Irish GP (spoke the truth not the narrative from the beginning & lost his licence for being a spreader of misinformation) said that what goes on a death certificate in the absence of a post mortem is a best guess.
Lovely, refreshingly honest.