<
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates>
"How many people have died because of the covid-19 pandemic? The answer depends
both on the data available, and on how you define “because”. Many people who
die while infected with SARS-CoV-2 are never tested for it, and do not enter
the official totals. Conversely, some people whose deaths have been attributed
to covid-19 had other ailments that might have ended their lives on a similar
timeframe anyway. And what about people who died of preventable causes during
the pandemic, because hospitals full of covid-19 patients could not treat them?
If such cases count, they must be offset by deaths that did not occur but would
have in normal times, such as those caused by flu or air pollution.
Rather than trying to distinguish between types of deaths,
The Economist’s
approach is to count all of them. The standard method of tracking changes in
total mortality is “excess deaths”. This number is the gap between how many
people died in a given region during a given time period, regardless of cause,
and how many deaths would have been expected if a particular circumstance (such
as a natural disaster or disease outbreak) had not occurred. Although the
official number of deaths caused by covid-19 is now 7m, our single best
estimate is that the actual toll is 24.2m people. We find that there is a 95%
chance that the true value lies between 17.9m and 31.4m additional deaths."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: June 15, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-84605385
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
