Excess mortality across the Western World since the Covid pandemic
bmjpublichealth.bmj.com
bmjpublichealth.bmj.com
Hmm, would have been better to talk about lost quality adjusted life years, because someone old and frail dying 3 months earlier than expected vs someone previously healthy dying are two very different things.
I can only read the Abstract, but from the quote above, it may seem that the containment measures had only a limited effect in reducing excess deaths... but wouldn't the number of excess deaths in a hypothetical world where no measures had been taken at all (no masks, no vaccines, no social distancing) be exponentially growing?? Say, it started at 1 million, went to 1.2 million the next year (with some containment measures already in place) and it would probably have gone way higher the next year (but it didn't) if the pattern continued, wouldn't it? I guess eventually it would go back down, but that would probably only have happened when most people who are prone to dying from the virus would've have died already, which probably would take many millions more (ignoring the fact that viruses naturally become less lethal over time, as killing too many hosts is bad for spreading further). So I don't know, given all of these variables I would say 800,000 excess deaths in 2022 is perhaps showing that containment actually did work, just not as well as one would've hoped.
To me, a more likely scenario is that the virus would basically run through the world's population during the first year, killing most susceptible quickly. The fact the original was a more deadly strain and the complete overloading of medical care would not help either.
> ignoring the fact that viruses naturally become less lethal over time, as killing too many hosts is bad for spreading further
This is likely not a strong factor in Covid since it's not enough deadly and there's enough time to spread the virus before dying.
A more fitting explanation is the reversion to the mean. Covid-19 was/is an exceptionally deadly strain of coronavirus, it's more likely that its mutations will trend in the direction of mean coronavirus lethality.
> The presented data, especially for 2022, are thus preliminary and subject to backward revisions. The more recent data are usually more incomplete and therefore can undergo upward revisions over time. This implies that several of the reported excess mortality estimates can be underestimations.
¹ European Mortality Monitor: https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
² Blog post from Jan 29 2020: https://romanabashin.com/coronavirus-2020-outbreak/
Check out Sweden, they had limited/no lockdowns, very high vaccination rate and low post pandemic excess deaths.
Before the pandemic dad was a beast then he watched TV for 2 years and turned into a shuffling hunchback.
- What's your experience in your own country about this?
We have a state National Health Service good enough to give us those nice real statistics, and, whose tasty business volume (if it were a private enterprise), is yearned by economic groups that have the financial muscle to buy constant Fox-like spin on how state health is "supposedly" so superlative bad, and therefore should be privatized.
This paper clearly disproves their narrative - I guess this media narrative is driven 80% by economic interest / ideology - "get rid of the state"; and would even risk 20% by Putin's destabilization efforts.
Is it normal that it takes so long to go from Received to Accepted?
The sheer volume of papers on Covid/Long Covid et el is staggering too something like 3/4s of a million individual bits of research have been published (all showing its bad news for humans!) and that combined with the doubling of days out sick everyone is enduring due to multiple Covid infections and the brain fog from Long Covid is likely not helping to get things handled quickly.