[ArkanExplorer]

Does anyone have a list of all countries with annual deaths in 2020, vs prior years for the past decade?

Surely the best way to examine the true impact of COVID is to understand the raw death figures, particularly if there were factors such as weak 2019 flu seasons/deaths which may have contributed to mortality displacement?

[ciceryadam]

A journalist in Slovakia did a comparison of current weekly deaths vs extreme values for 2000-2019:

https://dennikn.sk/2304197/prehliadli-sme-mozno-az-styritisi... - the grey dotted dash line is the extreme values for the last 2 decades, red line is the current deaths, black dotted dash line is the threshold of standard deviation.

The most extreme value in the last 2 decades was 1411 deaths per week, last week of 2020 had 2059 deaths per week.

[ArkanExplorer]

These weekly death stats are not useful because if no one dies in week 1, but everyone dies instead in week 2 (plus those who would have died anyway in week 2), it will show week 2 as being catastrophic, and everyone will just ignore week 1.

We need the raw annual data which basically removes this noise.

[mrow84]

If you look at the chart the death in 2020/2021 are well outside the extremal values for the previous two decades, and the "mass" contained there is much larger than the cumulative discrepancies for earlier in 2020. At that level of signal I don't think the weekly data can be dismissed as not useful.

[ArkanExplorer]

I looked up Slovakia data specifically.

Deaths: 2020: 59,000 [1] 2019: 52,234 [2] 2018: 53,914 [2]

So a 9.4% increase from 2018 to 2020.

By contrast, Sweden had a 5.7% increase. [3]

Slovakia has lockdown and curfew.

Isn't the conclusion here that lockdown in Europe is failure, when with only voluntary measures Sweden was able to achieve a lower death rate?

[1]https://spectator.sme.sk/c/22594536/in-2020-slovakia-suffere... [2]https://countryeconomy.com/demography/mortality/slovakia [3]https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

It seems implausible that lockdowns in Slovakia have achieved anything - by contrast lockdown may be contributing to deaths since people are not seeking regular medical care:

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-lockdown-may-have-ind...

[mrow84]

Well this is a different topic - the issue I was addressing was the utility of weekly data presented by ciceryadam, which you were questioning.

As to you new point - you are drawing your conclusions from disparate data sources, whilst ignoring confounding factors (as pointed out by ljf). The data on wikipedia give a less dramatic picture, and after adjusting for population things look even less dramatic (10.0 -> 10.8 per 1000 for Slovakia and 9.0 -> 9.5 for Sweden). I don't think you can draw serious conclusions from such limited data.

[ljf]

What else do you know about Sweden that could have skewed their figures? Great healthcare? Strong public support of the measures that were put in place? Trust in govt? Healthy community to start with?

To say that Sweden and Swedes took no steps to protect themselves and their communities is baseless - I assume you do not live there? I have friends in Sweden, and the lives they are living are very very different to the friends in Australia and NZ.

[rimliu]

Many deaths in care homes early in the pandemic, that's what skewed their figures. If you took number for the second wave only they would score way better. Lithuania already surpassed Sweden by number of cases per capita, and is really close to surpass it by number of deaths per capita. Sweden never had lockdowns. Lithuania has been living in strict lockdowns for 6 or 7 months, I am not even sure.

[ciceryadam]

If you check the graph in my first comment, you can see that the 9.4% increase happened onward from week 42, so it was the second wave that hit the country hard. By that time, the country gave up on contact tracing. Plus in the second wave , the lockdown was enforced only for people not tested by mass antigen testing.

You can compare Denmark and Slovakia (similar population size) for 2 different approaches to the 2nd wave, with 2 completely different outcomes. Denmark as a whole has as many people in ICUs as Slovakia has in one hospital.

[ciceryadam]

Exactly, if you have a surplus of dead people for 15 weeks straight, that means something.

[ljf]

Best way to assess the impact in terms of deaths, but don't forget that the impact will also be on those suffering long covid symptoms.

My wife was first ill with covid this time last year, and is still suffering now. She didn't get covid that bad, wasn't hospitalised, and prior to falling ill was working out 4 days a week and a damn busy person.

Now a 15 min walk can see her needing to sleep it off for 2 hours.

We are very lucky that she wasn't working before this, as there is no way she could have worked this last year. She knows of many others who have lost jobs, houses and even partners due to the impact of their long covid.

So I'm always a little touchy when people act as though deaths is the only factor to record.

[unanswered]

Do you have any evidence that these symptoms were caused by long covid and not by something else that changed at roughly the same time, like lockdowns?

[ljf]

Obviously I have none at all, though on online covid support groups you will find people from a range of countries that have (or have not) locked down to varying degrees - so should be pretty obviously not linked. It is so odd that people are so keen to question others long term impacts from a novel disease, when I've not seem the same effort put in to down playing the long term effects of SARs on people.

[dcolkitt]

> Surely the best way to examine the true impact of COVID is to understand the raw death figures

Is it though? As an example motor vehicle fatalities went up sharply in 2020. Is this due to the pandemic?

If anything the pandemic should have decreased car accidents, because miles driven went down. It seems there’s possibly an orthogonal force at work. Possibly the rising market share of monster pickup trucks, which are particularly deadly to pedestrians.

My point is the pandemic was obviously the biggest change that happened in 2020, but it wasn’t the only change.

[throwaway0a5e]

>Is it though? As an example motor vehicle fatalities went up sharply in 2020. Is this due to the pandemic?

>If anything the pandemic should have decreased car accidents, because miles driven went down. It seems there’s possibly an orthogonal force at work. Possibly the rising market share of monster pickup trucks, which are particularly deadly to pedestrians.

>If anything the pandemic should have decreased car accidents, because miles driven went down. It seems there’s possibly an orthogonal force at work. Possibly the rising market share of monster pickup trucks, which are particularly deadly to pedestrians.

Nice theory but I think it's far more likely that the pandemic completely upended "regular traffic" everywhere causing millions of people to be driving/walking at days/times/places and in traffic conditions that they were not accustomed to and this was a fairly instant change so pretty much everyone was flying by the seat of their pants. Predictable traffic is safe traffic and the pandemic changed normal traffic patterns in pretty much the entire western world creating tons more opportunities for mismatched expectations of behavior between traffic participants.

[strawhatguy]

According to data in the UK from May last year, more likely to be in a crash (although total trips were down, as you note). Link below notes crashes around a couple of football events went from 16 (in jan) to 70 (in mar). I don't think pedestrians enter into it.

So perhaps more risky driving occurs when fewer other cars are around? Maybe the risk-averse stay home, leaving only riskier people to go out? Clearly, the pandemic had an indirect effect here though.

https://www.vin.li/era/covid-uk-report/

[labatyd]

The quality and trustworthiness of that data will vary from very high to we know for a fact its made up.