Yeah, I get that. I guess I just mean that the worst pandemic of the last 100 years and (so far) it's maybe 17% deaths over the baseline. That feels kinda low.
So the pandemic is responsible for the 17% (in this scenario) uplift above baseline plus an unknown portion of that baseline itself.
To be honest one cause, which changed a lot of behaviour that rolls into the baseline, pushing the global baseline up that much seems pretty impressive to me.
Would be also interesting to consider distribution of that excess and how China fared in the excess mortality department. After the early days they seemed to keep it tightly under control, and they contain an enormous portion of the world’s population. That might suggest that excess mortality elsewhere was even further above baseline and the excess mortality only looks this good because 1.2 billion people mostly stuck to baseline?
It will indeed be interesting to see how the distribution of deaths plays out.
Out of curiosity, do you have any sources on that?
I’ve been interested in this topic after observing, locally, a number of politicians who had previously pushed hard to cut funding for mental health and who were ideologically opposed to the concept of lockdowns suddenly and vocally expressing a great deal of concern about mental health & a supposed uptick in suicides that was (they claimed) going to be worse than COVID itself.
When all was said and done, though, suicide rates in my locality were significantly lower than average: https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/suicide-deaths-in-alberta-in-2020...
Where are you getting your information from.
If plane crashes increased 17% in a single year, it would be bit. If cancer deaths increased 17% in a year, it would be pretty remarkable.
It will also be interesting to see how death rates behave in the following years post covid, since it did affect elderly population disproportionately.