EuroMoMo is an outfit that tracks weekly excess death throughout the Euro area (over 20 separate nations). Because COVID is mild now (Omicron is not deadly), any excess death — especially in the young — would be troubling.
But a disturbing recent rise in excess death can be seen in the Euro area for the young:
The marked week at bottom is the 27th week of 2022, and for those from age 15 to 44, weekly deaths ran approximately 6 standard deviations above the mean.
The red dotted line in the graph indicates “Substantial Increase” and it is set at 4 standard deviations above the mean.
Even Week 49 for those under age 15 was really, really bad:
Those young kids were dying at rates almost 5 standard deviations above the mean.
Why recent excess death in the young “cannot” be due to COVID
John Ioannidis et al. reanalyzed the original infection fatality rate (IFR) of wild-type COVID, aka the Wuhan-1 strain. After applying conversion factors that step down the fatality, once to Delta variant, then to Omicron, you can estimate the number of infections required to produce a single COVID death in any age group:
[click image to enlarge]
As you can see in column M in the spreadsheet, once you step down the IFR to Omicron variant, you need almost 10 times the infections to produce one death. For kids and teenagers, you need over 2.5 million infections — just to produce one death.
But let’s try to explain the recent excess kid death in the Euro area by way of Omicron:
As can be seen, you cannot invoke Omicron to explain the recent excess. It requires for there to be more than a billion new infections in Euro area kids within a 7-day period.
Spoiler: But there are not even 50 million kids under age 15 in all of the Euro area.
Reference
[true IFR of Wuhan-1 COVID] — 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
[From ~700,000 cases confirmed by sequencing, Delta was 42% as fatal as Alpha (and presumably Wuhan-1)] — Table 3. Number of confirmed and probable cases by variant as of 11 October 2021. UK Technical Briefing #25. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-sars-cov-2-variants-technical-briefings
[From 1.5 million confirmed cases, Omicron is 31% as lethal as Delta, making Omicron much safer than the seasonal flu] — Nyberg T, Ferguson NM, Nash SG, Webster HH, Flaxman S, Andrews N, Hinsley W, Bernal JL, Kall M, Bhatt S, Blomquist P, Zaidi A, Volz E, Aziz NA, Harman K, Funk S, Abbott S; COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium, Hope R, Charlett A, Chand M, Ghani AC, Seaman SR, Dabrera G, De Angelis D, Presanis AM, Thelwall S. Comparative analysis of the risks of hospitalisation and death associated with SARS-CoV-2 omicron (B.1.1.529) and delta (B.1.617.2) variants in England: a cohort study. Lancet. 2022 Mar 16:S0140-6736(22)00462-7. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00462-7. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35305296; PMCID: PMC8926413. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8926413/