Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by legofr 1628 days ago
The Economist claim China have had 140k to 1.9m excess deaths since the pandemic started in Wuhan (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...).

It's of course worth noting that China is one of the countries that stopped reporting excess deaths themselves since it would be pretty obvious that if China e.g. reported a million excess deaths then the majority could likely be attributed to SARS2 (whether they die directly from the virus or starve as a result of their brutal lockdowns).

2 comments

They aren't using Chinese excess death data, that shows zero deaths.

They are using excess deaths of Western countries, and projecting those death rates to China.

I'd you think that this is garbage, it is, and the Economist seriously fell off.

Economist using excess deaths figures from countries that failed contain covid to make upper bound inferences for PRC, which contained covid.

Also range starts from MINUS 150K, i.e. excess life. Which makes more sense considering the source Economist used to extrapolate excess deaths for PRC concluded excess deaths was lower outside of Hubei/Wuhan in the months post lockdown [0] and things have been basically normal since due to aggressive covid zero policies. Other countries that aggressively contained covid also has excess life stats.

[0] https://archive.is/d0Eo3#selection-1619.2-1619.274