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> the area under the excess deaths is misleadingly large

Yes, it's always a trade-off of course, but I generally prefer to sqrt() the radial axis of this kind of plot so it is equal-area.

Author here. That is a good idea. I will try that.

I have regenerated the graphs to use the square root of the count as the radius to keep the area constant, as others have suggested. I appreciate the feedback.

Hey, nice one — I’m glad I could give a useful suggestion…

Unfortunately it doesn’t make the numbers less tragic.

Curious how this works, trying to do the maths in my head, but polar integration not my strong subject.

Area of a slice is angle/2 x r^2.

Whole circle (angle = 2 x pi) is pi x r^2

>It’s important to look at and account for the number of deaths directly attributed to COVID, isn’t it?

Some people don't trust that data. I've heard people tell me that when COVID started the hospitals started marking everyone who died as having COVID regardless of what the real cause was.

>Shared hundreds of times on Facebook, posts claim: “Every time a hospital admits, discharges, or loses a patient to Covid-19, they are compensated 15% more according to the CARES ACT, SEC 4409”. The posts also say that New York City hospitals are “inflating all of their #coronavirus numbers” to take advantage of this section of the act.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-more-money-for-...

I've heard that often enough from a family member, often condensed into "they didn't die of COVID, they died with COVID" (which let to the obvious shot back later that year from me being "they didn't die of the vaccine, they died with the vaccine").

There is obvious borderline cases when COVID merely accelerated another disease (heart failure), but I bet in 99% of cases, the ultimate cause of death is one or multiple organ failure due to COVID.

The thing these graphs show (and I agree with the criticism that plotting it in polar makes the excess volume look much larger) is that you can completely ignore why anyone died and still see a very clear pattern that 2020 stands out as very different than previous years, and the plot of the delta between 2020 and those other years exactly matches the numbers that CDC attributes to COVID-19.

In other words, even if you question their categorization of deaths, it’s impossible to deny that something out of the ordinary caused 600k excess deaths in the US, and that “something” happened to coincide perfectly with the COVID-19 surges.

The important bit is the number of excess deaths, which is higher than previous 5 years' averages.

To draw a parellel, if someone started getting more tips at the restaurn they worked at, or more Tinder matches than usual, they should notice "Hey, something's changed..." and wonder what the reason behind it is..

The problem is, that some countries do not report covid properly, because its "defeated" and thus no longer allowed to appear in propaganda. Covid still exists, but is written down as pneumonia - or another "wasting" disease.

This creates the illusion, if one takes those countries media for real, that in other countries the disease is not as ravaging or non-existant. One should trust democratic countries data more and signal distrust on data/ positions / declarations from authoritarian regimes.

This however is not happening much on online plattforms, were one dictators "cheerful" lies are equally loud represented next to a loyal servant of a democratic state giving "grim" news.

The platforms thus help to creates the impression, that authoritarian regimes are dealing "better" with the situation and those wishing for a return to the "before" times, seeing those before times seemingly alive, thus steer towards totalitarian propaganda.

Lies for money subvert the system allowing to sell lies for money as a business model.

This problem solves itself.

If a government is caught lying, its previous statements to a fact should be auto-corrected and future statements be overwritten with a extrapolated truth, given by someone proofen to be trust worthy.

> I've heard people tell me that when COVID started the hospitals started marking everyone who died as having COVID regardless of what the real cause was.

From what I've heard, it went both ways, depending on the point in time. E.g. Poland had an election coming up mid-pandemic, and around that period, many people believed the government is underreporting COVID deaths, by making doctors classify them as caused by any of the comorbidities present in the deceased (and past certain age, pretty much everyone had some comorbidity, e.g. a weak cardiovascular system, or cancer).

COVID statistics were always heavily politicized. I think the most reliable way of getting to the truth was, and still is, looking at the excess death counts (i.e. how many more people died in a given month over the average of deaths in that month in last few pre-pandemic years).

Even comparing excess deaths can be misleading, because you're comparing deaths during lockdown to deaths in previous years not in lockdown. In other words, you're not isolating a single variable (SARS-CoV-2 pandemic vs no pandemic) but rather multiple (pandemic plus non pharmaceutical interventions vs no pandemic).

We can sanity check the number fairly easily. COVID has a case fatality rate of ~0.5%, so if everyone in the US had caught the coronavirus there would be around 150k excess deaths. Probably multiply that by a 80% fudge factor to at least acknowledge that some of people who die of COVID were probably frail to start with and likely to get taken out by normal disease and aging.

0.5% of 300,000,000 is 1.5 million dead.

There may have been some shenanigans, of course, but some of the claims I heard came from misunderstanding the hospital classifications.

Hospitals got economic relief from Covid because they couldn't take in other patients for fear of the contagiousness of Covid. So they got "credit" for "Covid patients" for financial reimbursement claim purposes.

But that wasn't the "cause of death" on the death certificate. The COD was listed as whatever it was.

There looked to be some deliberate attempt to conflate these assignments in the minds of people by some bad actors last year.

But again, that's not saying that it didn't happen. But when it was being talked about last year it seemed like it was being used for political purposes.

Misattributions could be referring to two possible things:

A) Uncertainty about how deaths are effectively false positives, and how many "deaths due to COVID" weren't counted. This is a combination of plain uncertainty, not having testing available for everything, all the way up to people fudging numbers (perhaps by choosing not to test categories of deaths).

B) It's unclear (as in people will argue, on both sides) if "deaths with COVID" vs "deaths due to COVID (with some definition of 'due')" is the right measure.

The failures is just shit talking (shit talk can be both deserved and undeserved) the government responses. The basis of the shit talking is that the red and green lines should be far closer to the previous baselines.

Author here. Yes, I mean both kinds of misattributions. We don't have thorough enough testing to use case numbers or what is written on a death certificate. Just using excess deaths, it is much clearer to me.

As for shit talking, I have been frustrated since March of 2020 at the impotence and incompetence of our culture and government to respond and I'm tired of arguing with Trump and Biden apologists. I could probably word all of that better.

> It’s important to look at and account for the number of deaths directly attributed to COVID, isn’t it? Is there some discrepancy between the excess YoY deaths implied here and the number directly attributed to COVID? Also would be good to normalize per-capita, just to fully factor out population growth?

If that's important to you than just use Cartesian graph. Polar graph shows better seasonal patterns as it does not cut abruptly at the end of the each year.

Author here: I originally started doing this for my state, Florida. I wanted to show what our normal cycle of deaths looks like. We generally have the most deaths during the dry, cold weeks of at the end of January and the beginning of February. We generally have the fewest deaths during August, when it is hottest and most humid.

There was a lot of discussion around how many more deaths were caused by COVID versus normal expected causes. I wanted to make that clearer.

You make a good point about the area being misleadingly large. I had not thought of that.

As for population growth, I thought about that but I'm not sure where to get reliable numbers for each region. As is, one can see that in 2017-2019, the curves were showing steady growth as expected to correlate with population.

Author here. I have regenerated the graphs to use the square root of the count as the radius to keep the area constant, as others have suggested. I appreciate the feedback.

I was thinking about that while reading these plots too. But I also wonder if readers will understand the slopes.

What would remove the distortion would be a 3D plot on the surface of a cylinder.

However, connecting the end of one year to the start of the next is not what's important. Having a undistorted line graph that plots each year would be much more informative.