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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

The average death rate for people in nursing homes for an entire year wasn't even as high as the death rate was for just a few week period: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden...

Almost ~3200 people died in nursing homes in a couple of months at the beginning of the pandemic. There's ~95k people in nursing homes. That's 3.3%...

These deaths still account for ~1/5th of all Sweden's covid deaths.

Hence, when people say 5x as many people died in Sweden - a full 1x of that is from the early nursing home no-strategy.

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Doesn't say anything, death rates are not constant, it always varies a lot ever year by year. Did 2020 have excessive mortality per capita compared to other years or not? No it didn't. It doesn't matter if you find some anecdote.

Everyone knows death rate was high in peak covid. As it always is in peak flu season, so what, the year was well within standard deviation

This is false, you have been misinformed. See here, and compare for instance Sweden with their neighbours Norway and Finland.

https://www.euronews.com/2021/02/17/eu-excess-deaths-in-2020...

It doesn't make any sense to compare it to neighboring countries, you need to compare the same country to previous years. That's the real interesting statistic, and the one that nobody is showing you. Because it's not dramatic enough..

The graph is exactly that. Each country’s excess mortality compared to that countries previous years.

The comparison with neighbours is to gleam the effects of their differing mitigation strategies.

I looked at it again, it's only comparing to the average, without knowing the standard deviation it doesn't really say much. "2020 was above average" yeah we know that, but was it higher than a "usual" year? No it wasn't, and you can't draw that conclusion by comparing it to the average.

Also it looks like they are doing the comparison month by month which doesn't make much sense since this will vary a lot of course...

This data is compiled by professional statisticians.

Deaths aren't evenly distributed throughout the year. High-traffic seasons will cause a spike, very cold or hot weather, etc. So month-by-month comparison is reasonable. Doing that also shows in the graphs when the waves hit various countries.

I agree, it's missing the standard deviation though. (But again, look at the graphs, you'll see a difference of 10, perhaps 20% fluctuating around zero, and then suddenly a wave of 60,80,100% more deaths. It's unlikely a coincidence.

month-by-month doesn't make sense because the flu doesn't happen at the same month each year, and yes without at least also the standard deviation, it doesn't say anything.

Just seeing that the temperature is below average outside doesn't say anything about the question: do we have abnormal weather? Is there a crisis? And even if this years winter is colder than the last three years, still doesn't mean that it's abnormal.

It needs to be a statistical outlier to be abnormal, it needs to be statistically significant. Why are they not showing previous years? Why are sample sizes deliberately small when we have more data? Why don't we see basic required numbers such as standard deviation, median, percentiles? It's all clickbait bullshit

This is all public data. If you think there’s some big conspiracy you can look it up yourself, calculate how the data show COVID is no big deal and then share the results.

Yeah I already looked at the public data and did the calculations, and I am sharing the results as I've said in other comments, and I challenge anyone to disprove me with another opinion that holds up to normal basic statistical scrutiny, and not some misleading clickbait bullshit

I looked through your comments but can't find the link to your calculations. Would you mind sharing it again here?

Here's the source data I used (only Sweden): https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...

You don't even need to make any calculations really, just take a quick look at the table to see that the death rate was unusually low 2019 and only slightly high in 2020 (Edit: sorry, almost compensated by 2019's low numbers, not completely). And if you go back in time, you can see that in fact every single year between 1999-2012 had a higher mortality rate than 2020.

Thanks for the link!

Yes, I see that. I calculated the mortality rate for all years, then the average and standard deviation for the last 10 years preceding 2020.

The average is 0.92%, standard deviation is 0.03%. The mortality rate in 2020 was 0.95% or exactly one standard deviation above the average for the last 10 years.

There is also another clear trend from the data which is slowly but steadily declining mortality rates. Obviously since 1749, but this trend is especially noteworthy during this century (since 2000). Then only one year has increased mortality (by more than one least significant digit) which is 2020.

2020 saw 10% higher mortality than 2019.

So to conclude: I'm by no means a statistician but I'd say this is probably not a random fluke.

> Did 2020 have excessive mortality per capita compared to other years or not? No it didn't.

Yes, it did. The statistics are pretty obvious: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

I'm saying compared to other years. That link does not compare to other years, it only compared 2020 to itself.

> Counts of deaths in the most recent weeks were compared with historical trends (from 2013 to present) to determine whether the number of deaths in recent weeks was significantly higher than expected, using Farrington surveillance algorithms (1).

I just want to know year by year death rate per capita, and average, and standard deviation. That's the only way I can draw the conclusion "is there anything abnormal going on"

All cause mortality in Sweden is flat and significantly lower than the last 20 years or so.

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