Tag: causes of death

Why do Swiss people die?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://blog.datawrapper.de/why-do-swiss-people-die/

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Looking at the evolution of premature deaths, we can celebrate the progress made in medical research. Years lost to infectious diseases like tuberculosis have reduced dramatically, and deaths due to AIDS in particular are nowadays close to zero, a drastic decline since the height of the pandemic in the 1990s. Cancer and cardiovascular diseases have followed a similar path, though they still cause a high number of premature deaths. We can observe that years lost to suicide before age 70 have also declined significantly. In a country where assisted suicide is legal, there is maybe something empowering in the prospect of dying healthy of old age. Years lost to alcoholism and car accidents have also declined — it may be that prevention and overall security have reduced these types of more behavioral deaths.

Author(s): Luc Guillemot

Publication Date: 26 Oct 2023

Publication Site: datawrapper

Fact Check: Covid as a Leading Cause of Death in Children

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.covid-georgia.com/pediatric-news/fact-check-covid-is-a-leading-cause-of-death-in-children/

Graphic:

Excerpt:

In the CDC ACIP meeting on June 17 to discuss childhood Covid vaccines, a table was presented showing Covid was a leading cause of death in US children as part of a slide deck on the epidemiology of Covid-19 in children and adolescents by Dr. Katherine Fleming-Dutra. The source was a pre-print written by a group of academics from the UK, including Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, who is well-known on Twitter for her strong views on Covid. I later learned that a very similar slide was also presented at the beginning of the FDA VRBPAC meeting earlier in the week.

The slide was shared on Twitter by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina (“Your Local Epidemiologist”), and retweeted by many influential people including Jerome Adams, Julia Raifman (tweet now deleted), Gregg Gonsalves, and Leana Wen. Only problem? It’s completely and utterly false. The pre-print it’s based on includes significant errors that invalidate the results. And the slide makes additional errors on top of the pre-print. It’s really disturbing that data this poor made its way into the meetings to discuss childhood Covid, and that it took me less that a few minutes to find a major flaw (and then I found many more as I looked deeper). I contacted the study’s corresponding author, Dr. Seth Flaxman, who originally said he’d get back to me on Monday, but responded early Sunday morning to get more information about the source of the Underlying Cause of Death data I used for Covid (the CDC WONDER database, Provisional Mortality Statistics, 2018-present). He later posted on Twitter to say than an updated pre-print would be available soon.

….

The second major issue with the pre-print are the time periods for the deaths. The underlying cause of death data is for a single year – 2019 (more on that later). However, the rankings of Covid deaths by age group in the pre-print include both cumulative (over 26 months) AND annualized deaths for some strange reason. That means Covid is inexplicably ranked twice for each age group.

Below is the table ranking leading causes of death for 15-19 year olds. Notice that Covid is listed both as the 4th AND the 6th leading cause of death. This is non-sensical and extremely misleading. It is completely inappropriate to compare the cumulative number of Covid deaths over 26 months to deaths from other causes over a one year period. The only way to make a fair comparison is to use an annualized number. There’s no good reason the cumulative number of Covid deaths over 26 months should be included on this list at all.

Author(s): Kelley in Georgia

Publication Date: accessed 22 Jun 2022

Publication Site: COVID-19 in Georgia

Essential Terms of the Authority Crisis

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://polimath.substack.com/p/essential-terms-of-the-authority

Graphic:

Excerpt:

This last week, the CDC held their ACIP meeting to discuss whether or not they should recommend the COVID vaccines for children 6 months to 5 years old. While presenting on the danger of the virus for children, a slide was shown claiming that COVID presented as one of the leading causes of death for children.

Kelley, who runs covid-georgia.com, saw this slide and immediately knew it was false. She has been tracking COVID data in excruciating detail in Georgia since the beginning of the pandemic and has recently become an expert on the CDC’s pediatric death data simply because it was such a disaster and she wanted to get down to the truth of the matter.

This slide above is no small error. Not only did it count the wrong number for pediatric COVID deaths, it compared all pediatric COVID deaths in a 26-month period to annualized deaths from other causes. This is a massive data error, and yet it persisted through a supposedly rigorous data check from 11 authors and was selected by top-tier scientists for their landmark presentation to the most knowledgeable experts in the field.

Author(s): Matt Shapiro

Publication Date: 21 Jun 2022

Publication Site: Marginally Compelling at substack

U.S. Mortality Trends Through the Pandemic

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/us-mortality-trends-through-the-pandemic?s=w

Video:

Graphic:

Excerpt:

I discuss this in the portion of the talk about death rates by age group.

For 2021, the worst relative increase in mortality, compared to 2019, was for ages 30-44.

[I have called it the Millennial Massacre, but it obviously overlaps with Gen X…. and Middle Age Massacre doesn’t exactly work, either. Dang the allure of alliteration].

We will see in a moment that most of that mortality increase didn’t come from COVID.

If you look at overall mortality, obviously total mortality for this age group is much lower than for those much older.

A 5% increase in mortality for those aged 85+ will translate to a much larger number of deaths, but a 50% increase in mortality for those aged 40-44 is extremely worrisome to actuaries and insurers even if the absolute number of deaths is lower in impact. We’re setting reserves and expectations based on certain assumptions, and we’re generally not assuming fluctuations of 50% — that’s just nuts compared to our historical experience…..

…..until now.

Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell

Publication Date: 20 May 2022

Publication Site: STUMP on substack