Confirmed Covid-19 deaths per million vs. GDP per capita, Jan 1, 2023 | Hacker News Reader

Confirmed Covid-19 deaths per million vs. GDP per capita, Jan 1, 2023

ourworldindata.org

9 pointsls159 comments

Defaults to log-log, which isn't terribly helpful.

Also, "GDP per capita based on purchasing power parity (PPP). PPP GDP is gross domestic product converted to international dollars using purchasing power parity rates": that's also likely to trip people up.

It would seem that the most likely explanation is that richer countries are better at confirming deaths? Or that small, dense urban microstates did badly? (Hong Kong the massive outlier)

Poorer countries are likely to have a heavily-young population pyramid? Less likely to have lots of long-range travel?

It might be interesting to replot these vs median age.

(I prefer log-log as none of the scatter gets smushed; what would you prefer?)

It would be interesting to see this with excess mortality instead: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

Would be more accurate too since the different ways to attribute deaths to covid really pollutes the data. For instance, in some places, they literally went with "any death within N amount of days after a positive covid test" (N usually being around 28 days) no matter what the reason was.

The creates an inflated number that was convenient for politicians/health orgs to drive whichever policy they desired. Data was usually massaged to justify pre decided policy, not the other way around (common occurrence in economics/politics and think tanks).

The proverbial “motorcycle accident 3 weeks after fully recovering from covid” was particularly maddening when used to justify virtually unlimited powers. More credibility was lost than compliance was gained, I guarantee you.

>> Due to varying protocols and challenges in the attribution of the cause of death, the number of confirmed deaths may not accurately represent the true number of deaths caused by COVID-19.

How can this then be "confirmed deaths" if they themselves state it's not possible to accurately determine them.

Confirmed by the authorities of the respective countries, as opposed to confirmed by independent researchers, which I guess is impossible to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com