Does this comparison account for the vaccinations being administered to specific populations? In the UK it's been targeted at the most vulnerable & elderly.

Historical trends don't factor in the past 12m stay-at and work-from home spike, and related spike in sedentary living.

Your natural incidence rate is whole-population but the vaccine rollout has been weighted to the oldest and least healthy. These may be the population that most of those cases happened in otherwise.

You can assuage some of these things by looking at other vaccines, assuming they're given to the same demographics.

Covid has been in the US for about a year and killed over 500 000 people so we can approximate that to be about 500 000 in a year. The top 3 leading causes of death in the US in 2017 were heart disease (635 260), cancer (598 038), and accidents (161 374) [0]. That puts covid solidly in third place even if you assume the covid numbers are over counted. Heart disease and cancer accounted for over 20% of deaths each so that would make covid somewhere a little under 20% of deaths. Based on that, nearly 1 in 5 people who died in the last year in the US died of covid.

[0] https://www.healthline.com/health/leading-causes-of-death

If I got the vaccine and a blood clot, I'd want to understand it better. I'd want to understand the numbers at large to see whether it was caused by the vaccine. In the UK, the numbers need to be considered fully:

* 30 million have received the first

* 4 million have received the second

Let's assume that 80% of folk got the AZ vaccine and that there's an equal chance of clot after each vaccine. So we're stating that the chance is 42 / 34 * e6 * 0.8. That means that the chance of it happening (from just those numbers) is 0.000001544117647. Since there are some many zeros, 0.000_001_544_117647. These numbers are tiny.

Now compare that with the chance of death from Covid. For over 50 the chance of death is much higher (calculated by UK population number and deaths in population over over 50 from COVID). When I did the calcs yesterday on the Norwegian (iirc) numbers assuming about 30 per million (higher ratio than the UK numbers), it seemed that for the under 40's the chance of death from vaccine was slightly lower than dying from COVID.

In the UK, COVID deaths might be considered higher than other countries due to differences in the way in which deaths are recorded.

The next question to ask is what the likelihood of a similar blood clot within the general population if they'd not had the vaccine. From what I hear those chances are similarly low. From what I've read from doctors it sounds like the chances are higher than without the vaccine. Some joked that this could therefore be considered an anti-blood clotting medicine.

Next put this into comparison with other medications, such as the contraceptive pill where chance of blots clots is 1:1000.

The numbers at large matter.

Huh? The number of people who died of sars-ncov-2 compared to how many died of it...before it existed?

The argument that the number of deaths in the US greater than the baseline from the previous year is roughly the same as the reported deaths where there was a covid infection, so our count seems accurate?

The argument is that the numbers should be reported properly - with their context and baseline. For COVID cases in general, it can, it should and it is being applied in many statistics. It is an important number for understanding the disease.