Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

[Bofferbrauer2]

numberwang said:

I am talking about the countries mentioned before (for example in central and northern Europe and nearly all of Eastern Europe) with fewer deaths in 2020 compared to previous years while producing covid deaths certificates.

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#

This database contains some more countries (like Eastern Europe):

https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/

Nice cherry-picking. And even then, you should have looked the stats more closely, because there is an excess if you zoom in into 2020 in all those countries. It's just very small and not enough to significantly alter the statistics so far.

But let's have a look at the weekly stat across Europe, shall we:

One can clearly see the spike from spring here. And the reason why the number of deaths isn't significantly higher than the previous years: We had a very low number of deaths in winter because a very mild winter this year in Europe, even milder than last year (it was snowing a grand total of one day here for instance - and that melted by the evening already), and thus the flu, pneumonia and similar diseases weren't very deadly. Without Covid, we would actually have a record low number of deaths instead of a somewhat elevated one. But let's have a look at exhibit number 2:

See how Europe was lagging behind the previous years until Covid hit us and put the year into the top spot within a coule weeks? Also, see how the leads keeps growing slightly since week 30 while the other years stay flat? That's the ongoing Covid deaths right there!

A good way you can see that Covid is the culprit of these deaths is by looking at the age groups. Children deaths actually dropped below the baseline this year:

Compare this with older age groups, as in 45 and up, and you can clearly see how those got more and more affected by covid the older they were:

Long story short, a weak winter and flu season blurred the number by having a record low number of deaths prior to Covid. But at closer inspection, no country got spared from it's effects - just some got hit a bit more than others.