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Comment by desertrider12 | Hacker News Reader

When do you expect the death deficit to show up in mortality data? So far it looks like most (but not all) countries had an increase and then returned to the previous trendline: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year. For the world's total deaths per year, it definitely looks like the area under the curve increased due to covid.

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>When do you expect the death deficit to show up in mortality data?

right away. I'm not an epidemiologist, but it's simple logic. A certain number of people of every age die every year. infants, toddlers, tweens, adolescents, middle aged people, old people, in each group a certain %age of people die every year of "all cause mortality". More old people die than young people (we're talking about rates here, % chance of dying)

so, if there is a period where a whole bunch extra old people who die one year, that whole bunch extra old people are not around the very next year to die, because they're already dead.

If the numbers don't add up, somebody is hiding data. the numbers absolutely should make sense.

so, one explanation for what you are saying is that extra old people didn't die, it was the same number of old people; who died must have been young people, because those "missing deaths" will not show up in the "normal" death statistics for a long time. But that's not what we were told happened, so again, something is not right with the data.

I do want to believe what you're saying because it means fewer life-years lost but... the other explanation is that covid plus the countermeasures to it really did impact people's health (not just the fatalities) and increased net mortality. We can check back in a few years but so far this explanation seems likelier to me.

Wow I haven't seen that graph before. It's very striking. It certainly shows Covid was not "just the flu"

yeah, but that's not a significant point. covid "not having been the flu" is a different statement than covid is just the flu now. the Spanish flu (1919 or whenever that was) was not "just the flu" either, but it burned bright and then died out in a very short time.

the question is not whether covid-19 happened, it did. the question is whether our various responses did anything or much at all to help, and whether it was productive to turn it into an us/them political issue and suppress speech and criticism to maintain the facade of being right. qui bono?

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