[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.