Mortality Nuggets: NYT Misleads, COVID Deaths Down, and Car Crash Fatalities Up

Nature is healing... and I am trying to, also

So I’ve got good news and bad news, and, alas, I’m going to start with some bad news (for me).

I have carpal tunnel syndrome

More here: Livejournal post on my diagnosis

The short written version is that I’ll have more videos right now, not written pieces. Sorry to those who prefer reading to watching/listening… I’m the same way.

Reporting on COVID deaths at the NYT

I am unhappy with the New York Times, but what else is new.

It’s about this graph:

Here’s my video about the article:

As I note, here is a good graphic from the article:

COVID deaths are down for all the groups since the winter peak. It’s just that it dropped down faster for old folks compared to young folks, probably due to vaccinations.

COVID deaths are down, as is non-COVID excess mortality

Here’s the good news!

This is a quick snapshot from the CDC’s Excess Mortality Dashboard

Check out this graph:

I want you to notice something — the blue bars are the “with COVID” portion of deaths, and the chartreuse bars are the ones “without COVID”. The bars are weekly counts of deaths when they occurred. Ignore the most recent weeks because they don’t have full data reported yet.

The red pluses indicate excess mortality, defined as exceeding the 95th percentile for expected mortality for that week (so it includes seaonality). You can see the excess mortality from the 2017-2018 flu season, which was bad for a flu season.

The non-COVID mortality has been in excessive mortality range for almost all 2020 after March. But since the beginning of 2021, it has dropped off…. and COVID mortality has also dropped off.

I think we may be almost in “normal” range soon. We shall see!

Fatal traffic accidents increased a lot in 2020

Back to the bad news.

The NHTSA put out two reports recently breaking down the stats I wrote about a month ago: Mortality Nuggets: Car Crashes, COVID Deaths, and the WONDER of the CDC

Sorry, this one is video only:

In case you’re curious, I covered traffic deaths in 2017: Mortality Monday: All About Traffic Deaths!

I hope we start seeing some more happy mortality trends soon.

Obviously, it takes time for the data to come in, but pretty much 2020 was horrific compared to recent years, the beginning of 2021 has not been great, but there are great indications that we may be getting back to “normal”.