Was he wrong, though?

Thing about Cassandra wasn’t that she was wrong, but that nobody wanted to hear the bad news. And, what do we traditionally do with the bearers of that bad news…?

Speaking unpleasant truths is a good way to win enemies, sadly. Puncturing delusional thinking is a thankless job, no matter what context or what it is about.

Of course, it does get you into the history books, when someone comes along with the honesty to admit “We wuz told…”.

Reminds me of an occasion when I found myself waiting at the back of a meeting room to make a presentation to the assembled Vice Presidents. Human Resources VP was up first. He looked around the room, and gave the mainly 55+ executives the probability that one of the executive team was likely to die in the next year. His point was that the organization needed to put more effort into succession planning and grooming replacements.

If I remember correctly, that Human Resources VP soon moved on to spend more time with his family.

Gavin, I don’t know a URL, but somewhere (census bureau?) there is monthly data for US/States deaths from 20xx up to now, including the missing 2016.

Illegals, presumably being young, wouldn’t affect US death numbers for a looooong time.

BTW, US Hispanic life span numbers are real good. Therefore, following the logic one reads so often, the US should adapt the US’s Hispanic Health System.

I once got into a very interesting discussion with a guy who did actuarial projections for a major life insurance company. The really disturbing thing was how fine-grained the data he had access to really was–He could tell you what the average death rates were going to be in most zip codes based on recorded causes of death, which is spooky as hell when you realize that in some of those zip codes, there are only about five or six people in specific demographic categories. So, in a given year, you knew that you’d lose an average of one 60-65 year-old man to heart disease in a given zip code, and with there only being a very few in that category… Yeah. He could pretty much narrow it down to “one of these five guys will die this year…”, which is creepy as hell when you think about it.

Some of the computer programs they use are damn near able to spit out the name of someone who is “due to die” in a given year, if the population is low enough in an area.

He was telling me that they lock out the actuaries from working on data that might be personal to them, in terms of where their families live, mostly because of the effect it has on the actuaries themselves. It’s a morbid profession–One of his co-workers had a daughter with a rare disease, and it really messed with his head knowing what he knew about the odds of her surviving much past her teenage years.

One issue is, what is the population of the US? We know there are millions of illegal aliens in the country, but no-one know for sure how many millions. They are illegal, after all, and not necessarily included in the count. One the other hand, there are all those dead people who reliably vote Democrat. Are they included in the 331 Million?

It seems that the US population age distribution is fairly rectangular up to about the age of 70, and then starts dropping. The old obviously have a higher probability of dying from old age (Covid, as we currently call it). On the other hand, the young have a higher probability of driving a car into a tree or having a drug overdose or a hang gliding accident.

Bottom line is, it is complicated! The number of people who die in a year is probably fairly accurate. We know that there is a secular increasing trend in the recorded annual deaths, and we know there are significant fluctuations around that trend. All in all, estimating “excess deaths” is a challenge. Reliably ascribing causes to those “excess deaths” is even more of a challenge. Readers of the NYT should be cautious.

This leads to some interesting arithmetic. For instance, if you consider the US’s population tree is roughly rectangular (all ages have the same numbers), and US people die at 80, then theoretically you should able to divide the US population by 80 and get the number of people who die in a year. Turns out, if you do this calculation, you’ll want to use the US’s population in 1980 – 40 years ago, halfway through the lives of those scheduled to croak this year.

Or maybe I goofed that calculation.

For what it is worth, the UN data shows a marked increase in US annual deaths from 2012 to the end of their series in 2015. A simple straight line extrapolation would predict 3.0 Million deaths in 2020, versus the actual US total of 3.1 Million, an “excess deaths” number of 128,000. That NYT figure of 446,000 “excess deaths” seems increasingly like untenable scaremongering.

A look at each of the US States can give some feel into this, too. Ditto, looking at other nations:

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid#excess-mortality-using-raw-death-counts

The unfortunate brown line can’t be expected to show population gains. Too much noise involved in its creation.

To get a feel for yearly variance in deaths, here’s a URL to download, by country, monthly death count data for a spreadsheet.

http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=POP&f=tableCode%3A65

US records go from 1980 through 2015.

That is an interesting graph. There were “Excess Deaths” in January 2018, but we did not get Lock Downs forced upon us.

It is a little suspicious that their “normal deaths” line is so level rather than trending upwards, given the increasing population and the aging of the population — both factors which explain the increasing trend in total deaths in recent years.

Everyone would agree that there have been some more total deaths in 2020 than usual. Covid is real, and part of the explanation. But the Lock Downs are also real, and have also caused “excess deaths” — individuals afraid to seek treatment for heart attacks, delayed diagnoses for cancer, desperation suicides, etc.

These things are very difficult to quantify. Some estimates in the UK are that about half of their “excess deaths” have been due to Lock Downs rather than to Covid.

I read and saw some pictures of Wuhan at the height of the epidemic where the city was covered in smoke. Could have been faked but people speculated that it was masses of bodies being burned.

If Chinese people tried to report such things police would very quickly end up at your doorstep and tell you to shut up. I also DO NOT BELIEVE that the Chinese released this on purpose at all. Not even in the slightest.

The reason I’m so adamant about this is I do not want any of you if you hear of another new virus to automatically dismiss it.