Normal Mortality

Post #891

A long-standing debate exists in science between two camps that can be referred to as the Positivists and the Naturalists. Naturalists believe that things have natures, while Positivists merely record the past and may only then say that they “personally believe” that the future will resemble the past — but cannot give an explanation why they do.

The established regularity of occurrences befuddles the Positivists, but the Naturalists tell you that things have natures, so it is expected that they will behave the same. For Naturalists, water boils at 100 degrees Celsius “because it is water.” For Positivists, water has boiled at that temperature in the past, but who knows about tomorrow!

Even Earth’s gravity could change tomorrow, according to those Positivists who make no claim whatsoever about the “record of regularity” in repeated scientific measurements. When Naturalist thinking is applied to death rates, you look for long stretches of stability. While environments change a lot, the nature of things is stable.

In the USA, a long stretch of stable death rates for 33-year-olds is found in the 16 years from 1999 up to 2014, inclusive:

When you take the mean of those 16 years, along with the standard deviation of those 16 years, then you can obtain a critical threshold value for 3 standard deviations above the mean — otherwise known as a 3-sigma violation. But that means that — for 8 years in a row — death rates have been “beyond normal” for this age.

The Affordable Care Act was implemented in 2013, giving government some control over healthcare. It is then when the death rates rose. Once government obtained even more control over healthcare (COVID era), death rates shot up to 60% above normal (60% excess). This is so even though COVID was not worse than flu for those of age 33.

Getting 33-year-olds to die at a rate that is 60% higher than baseline takes “some doing” — as it is far beyond the 3-sigma violation which indicates a special cause of variation which extends beyond common causes of variation.