Excess mortality seems like the best way to track the pandemic because determining whether someone died of covid can be debatable sometimes, but there can be no debate over whether someone died.
A great data source for EU excess deaths is Euromomo. They publish official national mortality statistics weekly from the 26 European countries.<p>Graphs and analysis as well.<p><a href="https://www.euromomo.eu/" rel="nofollow">https://www.euromomo.eu/</a>
I'm very confounded by the "Excess mortality by age group" data in the US. It _appears_ as if the mortality increase is _almost the same for all age groups_, especially at the beginning and after the initial hump. 15-64 yr olds had a <i></i>32% higher chance of dying<i></i> at the hump and stayed above 11% for most of the year. Wow.<p>All the previous findings were that COVID is _extremely unlikely_ to kill you if you are under 50, and pretty unlikely-ish under 70 -- so where are these deaths coming from?
Would total deaths be a more useful data point? CDC states that 2,839,205 Americans died in the year 2018. <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm</a><p>I would be curious to know how many Americans died in 2020, once the year concludes.
This study does not account for the statistical significance of changes in population structure. This study compares 2020 to data including 2015.<p>The 65-and-older population in the US grew by over a third (34.2% or 13,787,044) during the past decade, and by 3.2% (1,688,924) from 2018 to 2019. The world is aging in all of the countries reported in this study.<p>The peeks in March are interesting.
I assume someone posted this link in the discussion and it has faded, but the US CDC has a fine webpage addressing excess deaths in the US, with time series data for the last 3 years and an ability to look at individual State-level info<p><a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm</a><p>I’m not a fan of the automatic rescaling and truncating of the y-axis on charts by the original link. It is associated with a “lying with statistics” attack on the meaning of the graph. The CDC graphs don’t suffer from that problem.
A puzzle I'm facing right now professionally is in what way to take Corona into account in actuarial longevity / mortality models. Current thinking is it doesn't impact the long term best estimate of longevity. We will probably resume the ever upward trend in lifespans after we've successfully managed this storm. But what to think of the 1-in-200 year shock scenario? Do we expect another pandemic in the next 200 years (:: Yes, return frequency of pandemics is about 20-30 years)? Is this the biggest we can face or are there even bigger shocks (Black Death-like scenarios)? How to account for differences in policy response (these models use data from many countries as a baseline) and expected future responses (will we learn something from this crisis). And then the kicker: How to model this rigourously enough to get your model past supervisors.
The data for the bottom chart of US mortalities comes from this source, updated each weekday:
<a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm</a>
See also for Australia:<p>Measuring excess mortality in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic<p>Provisional deaths data for measuring changes in patterns of mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic and recovery period.
Released
25/11/2020<p><a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-excess-mortality-australia-during-covid-19-pandemic" rel="nofollow">https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-excess-mortality-a...</a>