On the topic of "hiding deaths"
Last edited Thu Apr 16, 2020, 04:12 PM - Edit history (1)
Since this pops up from time to time, I thought I'd make an OP to address the persistent dumb idea that merely because a death certificate does not say "covid-19" on it, that a wide ranging cross-country conspiracy of doctors and state vital statistics offices will manage to "cover up" excess deaths.
The reason we know how many people were killed by, for example, Hurricane Maria, is because we know, within a very tight range, how many people die from all causes on a regular basis.
Anyone familiar with Blue Oyster Cult's, "Don't Fear the Reaper" is a little out of date, since the current figure is around 150,000 deaths per day from all causes worldwide.
If something unusual is killing a lot of people, you can't actually hide that, regardless of what you put on a death certificate.
It is a simple matter to plot, for any given period of time, the measured number of deaths from all causes, and to compare that measured number to averages for the same time period in previous years.
For example, here is what it looks like for London, UK:
It's pretty easy to see that, as a rough approximation, about 1500 more people died in London in the first week of April than would normally happen.
Here is a plot of mortality for all of England for the last several years, showing expected and actual results:
This is a different visualization of England and Wales:
Sure, some causes, like auto accidents, are reduced right now, but that doesn't really have much impact on the overall picture for, say, New York City:
So you can easily see that there is a substantial spike in deaths in NYC well beyond any confirmed figure of "covid-19 deaths" that simply can't be "hidden", even if someone in NYC was inclined to do so.
This plot, from the Netherlands, is a good one to consider. It shows overall recent excess mortality (registered deaths - expected deaths) in different age groups, compared to deaths identified as 'covid-19' deaths:
From that sort of data, the undercount of officially-identified covid-19 deaths can be readily worked out with reasonable accuracy, since there are not too many other things causing substantial senior deaths (other than a chunk of them which might be attributable to various medical facilities or procedures being difficult to obtain at the moment).
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