Just So Ya Know

A couple of data stories for today.

The Very Unstable Lunatic and Bouncing Baby Bolsonaro continue to call out 'it is just a bit of flu', in hopes that folks will ignore the increasing pile of corpses in their countries. Both have been claiming that the death counts are inflated, vis-a-vis the seasonal flu counts. But, of course, they don't cite the comparable flu deaths.

Here's the ref to latest flu data (click 'View Chart Data' to view). Note, in particular that the term used is 'influenza like illness' and the column for 'influenza' is a small fraction of the attributed deaths. Lordy, why is that? Well, simply because flu invites opportunistic pneumonia, that's why. Direct influenza deaths are a minor part of the total. Not so, naturally, with Covid.

Another approach, which has been used for a very long time, is the calculate excess deaths. Epidemiologists do this as a matter of course. Here's the 'Financial Times' look at data

The FT has gathered and analysed data on excess mortality — the numbers of deaths over and above the historical average — across the globe, and has found that death tolls in some countries are more than 50 per cent higher than usual. In many countries, these excess deaths exceed reported numbers of Covid-19 deaths by large margins.

And, of course, there's the canard that 'it's just geezers and poor folks, so who cares?'. But the age distribution of Covid is far wider than flu.

For children, the risk of dying from Covid-19 appears to be much less than that of dying from influenza and pneumonia even in the most pessimistic of my three scenarios. From age 15 onward the Covid risk is higher, with the relative difference peaking for those in the 45 through 54 age group, whose risk of dying from Covid-19 in my middle scenario is four and a half times higher than their influenza and pneumonia mortality rate in 2018.

So, there you have it. The Very Unstable Lunatic and Bouncing Baby Bolsonaro have been lying to you. So it's not so surprising that these countries are running 1, 2 for the death crown. With Russia likely a dark horse contender, hiding its data behind an Iron Curtain.