Death Rates

Deaths above normal in the South

I found this graph on a blog post that goes into some detail about what this graph shows. It's pretty good.

This is not a bad graph. It doesn't specify what is causing the rise in death rates, but we can presume they are being caused by COVID-19. It would be helpful if we had a similar graph for previous pandemics like the swine flu or the Hong Kong flu. I suspect they would be very similar to this one, though they might have peaked earlier.

Might be a good chart, depending on where the underlying data came from. The whole pandemic thing has gotten so politicized that all data is under suspicion of being corrupted.

At the end of the story, the author writes:

"The above description leaves out a huge chunk of work related to computing excess deaths." 

A huge chunk of work? Yes, you would have to come up with a formula to do the computation, but once you have that it is a simple matter to copy & paste it into the rest of the column. I dunno, maybe some people are not familiar with copy & paste operations.

Collecting the data would be the bigger effort, but presumably that is being done by government agencies, not some starving journalist working his fingers to the bone.

Via Detroit Steve