[timeeater]

Classic to have the y-axis not start at 0 to make a curve look more dramatic.

According to the CDC, there seem to be about 12% more deaths than the average of the last three years, or about 300K. Number of deaths has been rising every year, though, sometimes increasing by up to 90k from one year to the next.

[tenacious_tuna]

From the linked article: "The raw death counts help give us a rough sense of scale: for example, the US suffered some 275,000 more deaths than the five-year average between 1 March and 16 August, compared to 169,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths during that period."

So that's 275k-169k=106k extra deaths, which is a napkinmath'd 17% increase over the baseline (assuming that's 106k deaths over a 12wk period, and baseline is ~50k/week).

A 17% rise in extra deaths seems pretty dramatic to me, regardless of the graphs.

Granted, I'd love to see error bars on this stuff, but I don't think the axis starting at 0 is some nefarious plot to dramatize the data.

[timeeater]

CDC at the moment says 12% increase compared to the average of the last three years.

Absolute number of deaths have been rising from year to year, sometimes with jumps of 90k.

Sure Covid has an impact, but whether it is dramatic is another question.

[tenacious_tuna]

> whether it is dramatic is another question.

I thought that _was_ the quesiton: you seemed to imply the graph not starting at 0 was the article editorializing in some drama. My point was the situation is indeed dramatic (perhaps "significant" is a better phrase?) on its own, and they weren't unfairly exaggerating it for clicks/attention/fearmongering/whatever.

It makes sense that 'absolute deaths' would rise as a function of absolute population size, but that's why this data is important to pay attention to: if our death rate is climbing more than expected, there's problems we should probably pay attention to.

[thu2111]

It is a problem and it should absolutely be paid attention to. US excess deaths aren't like in other countries, where they are generally on a long downwards trend. In the US they've been rising since the financial crisis.

Oddly this year the CDC baseline expected death rate diverged from the trend line:

https://twitter.com/Humble_Analysis/status/13356752493633536...

That looks bad. If they were projecting the long term trend forward as they did in prior years, excess deaths from COVID in the USA would suddenly become a lot lower.

One other thing to bear in mind - a lot of these graphs that make excess deaths look dramatic are only looking 5 years in the past, because that's generally the easiest data to get hold of. But death rates are falling with time, as you'd hope to see. If you look further back you don't have to go far to find years with similar death rates. E.g. the UK had one of the highest excess death rates in the world from COVID in the first wave, but when you look at historical data, it was no worse than the the winter of 1999/2000 when no special measures were employed.

Lockdowns are an ahistorically extreme move. For that to make sense the scale of the problem with have to be equally ahistoric but it's not. I've lived through years with excess death rates just as bad as 2020 and never even noticed, because nobody was commenting about it. That's the risk with very short term analysis.