In a previous Substack, I began developing a method of international comparison of excess death during COVID.
To get more precision in the estimate of the expected ratio of excess deaths between any two nations — based on age structure — I combined the age-specific infection fatality rates with the five-band age structures of South Africa and Sweden.
While the estimates in the chart below are likely overestimates, the model of an increasing infection fatality rate (IFR) with increasing age is still good and useful:
While this graph shows COVID infection fatality reaching 4% before age 75, that is very likely an overestimate.
Researchers such as John Ioannidis (top-left citation in the Excel image below) go the extra mile to show that most infection fatality rate estimates are flawed because they do not account for things like seroreversion in determining the true background spread of COVID.
But even research by Ioannidis et al. verify that there is an exponential growth in the fatality rate with age, so much so that someone in their 60’s is 167 times more likely to die than someone in their 20’s:
[click on the image above to enlarge it]
The first graph came from the IFRs shown at right in this spreadsheet (the “over-estimates”) but the key point here is not about the baseline level of risk, but about the change in the level of risk with age.
When you know how risk changes with age, then you can compare two nations.
The age structure of Sweden was compared with that of South Africa, and the relative lethality of COVID for five age bands was applied in order to produce an Index of COVID Susceptibility, or a COVID Susceptibility Index (CSI).
The upshot is that, based on age structure, Sweden was supposed to get, at minimum, 2.6 times more excess death than South Africa did. But South Africa ended up with more than quadruple the excess death rate of Sweden:
This indicates that something besides COVID was killing people in South Africa, because COVID deaths are “extremely” age-specific. It makes no sense for a younger population to have more than quadruple the excess death rate of an older one.
A prime suspect for the “excess-of-excess” death in South Africa are the COVID injections — as can be shown by the close-tracking of deaths with jab rates in South Africa:
International evidence suggests that COVID shots should be stopped, because of the unexplainable excess death in nations with younger populations when compared to excess death in Sweden, a nation with an older population.
Reference
[IFR study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation] — Variation in the COVID-19 infection–fatality ratio by age, time, and geography during the pre-vaccine era: a systematic analysis. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02867-1/fulltext#%20
[best-evidence IFR study by Ioannidis et al.] — Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly informed from pre-vaccination national seroprevalence studies. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.11.22280963v1
[age structure of nations] — OWID. https://ourworldindata.org/age-structure