Just curious. Did you do a regression of of the excess mortality line?
It looks like it would have a positive slope i.e. General mortality trend looks to be on the rise. Not sure why? In general I thought the consensus was that we were supposed to be getting “healthier” over time. It’s possibly due to the aging population or the decrease in health funding to the stars by our current federal government or maybe something completely unrelated.
I realize you’d want (need) it flat because your using it as “the baseline” and your intent is to get a baseline to compare 2020-2022 to 2015-2019 and your goal was not to compare mortality in general over time but to compare the periods in question. I’m just curious and interested in knowing if the trend was already on the way up before the pandemic years?
No. The dashed line I overlaid is hand drawn. The two dips during Winter are artifacts due to the baseline's typical increase in deaths during Winter. So I think a regression would need to take out those points first. What will be interesting is the following 3 months ie up till now. Which we won't see for 3 months. There will be many COVID deaths that may bring the excess mortality, excluding COVID, back down. I have heard that there may be a lot of overcounting of COVID going on in NSW at the moment, eg died with not from.
Cool. I might download the data and have a look myself, in John Dee’s analysis of all cause mortality in theUK, he sees an uptick in all cause mortality coinciding with the conservatives NHS “reforms” that he says gutted their public health system. My thought bubble was “could something like that be occurring in Australia” due to budget cuts. Anyway, thanks for another great article.
Thanks for another absolutely awesome article. You’ve really outdone yourself with this one.
I hope your reference to colour blindness wasn’t a little dig at me 😎. It wasn’t the colour that was an issue it was more me not wearing my reading glasses 🤓and probably some “selective vision”. I wasn’t expecting the big spike at the end in January, so I didn’t see it. A bit like the selective vision of our media and government. The vaccines are supposed to be safe and effective any evidence to the contrary is not welcome in their minds, so they don’t see it. It’s just not what they’re expecting.
……….. Begin Rant ………….
I’m surprised (not really) that this is not being investigated by academics who can get access to more granular data. I mean this with no disrespect, but you are a private citizen looking at the limited publicly available data and your doing an excellent job. I’m pretty sure there is more undisclosed data behind the scenes that we are just unaware of. It shouldn’t be left to people like you (or me) to do this sort of work. Our tax dollars are actually paying for “real statisticians”, “real epidemiologists” and “real scientists” to do this work, instead it looks like their time is being spent putting out advertisements for the pharmaceutical companies and telling us “How good is the vaccine 👍!”. They should get off their asses and look into it.
Ha. It was someone else that asked about the Around the World graphs I produced. There I was trying to show both effect of initial vaccination and boosters. Vaccination% was along the axis and I made the size of points relative to Booster%. It's hard to gauge differences in size of dots so I thought I was being smart by simultaneously using colour to show booster %. I randomly found a colour scale I liked (called jcolors pal12). It starts with dark, so small dots look like normal black and ranges through green to red. So at the high end there is a clear red sticking out. Someone who I showed it to, who was colour blind, wasn't clear if I was trying to show something else. So I realise I need to be smarter about these things.
In this post I am using one of the viridis colour scales for the absolute mortality graph. They are supposed to be colour blind friendly.
Hi Andrew
Just curious. Did you do a regression of of the excess mortality line?
It looks like it would have a positive slope i.e. General mortality trend looks to be on the rise. Not sure why? In general I thought the consensus was that we were supposed to be getting “healthier” over time. It’s possibly due to the aging population or the decrease in health funding to the stars by our current federal government or maybe something completely unrelated.
I realize you’d want (need) it flat because your using it as “the baseline” and your intent is to get a baseline to compare 2020-2022 to 2015-2019 and your goal was not to compare mortality in general over time but to compare the periods in question. I’m just curious and interested in knowing if the trend was already on the way up before the pandemic years?
Thanks…..
No. The dashed line I overlaid is hand drawn. The two dips during Winter are artifacts due to the baseline's typical increase in deaths during Winter. So I think a regression would need to take out those points first. What will be interesting is the following 3 months ie up till now. Which we won't see for 3 months. There will be many COVID deaths that may bring the excess mortality, excluding COVID, back down. I have heard that there may be a lot of overcounting of COVID going on in NSW at the moment, eg died with not from.
Cool. I might download the data and have a look myself, in John Dee’s analysis of all cause mortality in theUK, he sees an uptick in all cause mortality coinciding with the conservatives NHS “reforms” that he says gutted their public health system. My thought bubble was “could something like that be occurring in Australia” due to budget cuts. Anyway, thanks for another great article.
Hi Andrew
Thanks for another absolutely awesome article. You’ve really outdone yourself with this one.
I hope your reference to colour blindness wasn’t a little dig at me 😎. It wasn’t the colour that was an issue it was more me not wearing my reading glasses 🤓and probably some “selective vision”. I wasn’t expecting the big spike at the end in January, so I didn’t see it. A bit like the selective vision of our media and government. The vaccines are supposed to be safe and effective any evidence to the contrary is not welcome in their minds, so they don’t see it. It’s just not what they’re expecting.
……….. Begin Rant ………….
I’m surprised (not really) that this is not being investigated by academics who can get access to more granular data. I mean this with no disrespect, but you are a private citizen looking at the limited publicly available data and your doing an excellent job. I’m pretty sure there is more undisclosed data behind the scenes that we are just unaware of. It shouldn’t be left to people like you (or me) to do this sort of work. Our tax dollars are actually paying for “real statisticians”, “real epidemiologists” and “real scientists” to do this work, instead it looks like their time is being spent putting out advertisements for the pharmaceutical companies and telling us “How good is the vaccine 👍!”. They should get off their asses and look into it.
……….end rant……..
Thanks…
Ha. It was someone else that asked about the Around the World graphs I produced. There I was trying to show both effect of initial vaccination and boosters. Vaccination% was along the axis and I made the size of points relative to Booster%. It's hard to gauge differences in size of dots so I thought I was being smart by simultaneously using colour to show booster %. I randomly found a colour scale I liked (called jcolors pal12). It starts with dark, so small dots look like normal black and ranges through green to red. So at the high end there is a clear red sticking out. Someone who I showed it to, who was colour blind, wasn't clear if I was trying to show something else. So I realise I need to be smarter about these things.
In this post I am using one of the viridis colour scales for the absolute mortality graph. They are supposed to be colour blind friendly.
And I agree with your rant.