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Comment by tomgaga | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I really don't understand why people are still comparing these numbers like this. It's much more objective to just compare "excess number of deaths compared to last year per million". Like the New York times did: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

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Beware of comparing deaths to last year though, I'd rather take a 5 year average

the answer is simple: the data is there. you can't compare vietnam and germany on that page - if you can access it. (if i have to signup to read or buy, i'm not really interested. anonymous access used to be possible with paper, and it's still possible today)

I think it's only marginally useful though; for example you can't rationally make personal or policy decisions using this because the distortion Inthe data that the gp flagged is so large, and also we are so early in this event. In 18 months we will see!

Open it in a private browsing window and anonymity still is possible

Private browsing doesn't provide any form of anonymity: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Heck, it is tricky to remain anonymous even over the Tor Browser.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#Weak...

It does in the sense that the comment which I replied to meant it: access without being logged in to an account.

That's also not useful. Compare with a season of flu outbreaks, which last year wasn't

Euromomo shows data back to 2016, so you can see how 2020 compares to a bad flu year (2017) and a "good" flu year (2019):

https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

In some countries the excess deaths are higher that during a worst flew year in the last 5 years.

But also, since the virus is growing exponentially, differences in countries is by 10-100x, while the differences in the number of tests performed seems to be closer to 2-10x.

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