Symphonic Mortality Extremes

Post #636

Extremes in mortality would include “three-sigma violations” — where either deaths or excess deaths are beyond 3 standard deviations from what was expected. Here is an example of a “three-sigma violation”:

Notice how the three-sigma violation is '“demonstration of a special cause” — because the notion of just random chance causing it is so highly unlikely.

In the USA, for example, the weekly all-cause death counts have a standard deviation of 6.5% of the mean, and death counts more than 19.5% above or below the mean are “three-sigma violations.”

When looking at the excess death rather than the raw count, the highest standard deviation in weekly excess death discovered by Ioannidis et al. — in countries which were particularly vulnerable to wild swings in excess death — was 8.1%:

Given how 8.1% is the highest weekly standard deviation of excess death, then any single week with over 24.3% excess death — or with under -24.3% negative excess death — would represent a “three-sigma violation.”

A “five-sigma” violation would involve a week with +/- 40.5% excess death.

Weekly death counts have a normal distribution, so the probability of witnessing a “three-sigma violation” in a random week is approximately a quarter-percent (0.27%) — meaning that such violations occur randomly approximately every 370 weeks, or just under one single week in every 7 years.

That’s one single week in 7 full years of observation time.

But check out these synchronized “five-sigma” violators:

Before big increases in death, these 4 disparate regions of the world all saw five-sigma negative excess at approximately the same time as each other, moving together as if part of a symphony.

But such weeks are only randomly seen one time in every 33,000 years.

To get 4 nations to all reach a nadir like that — when the random chance for each individual nation to reach it is only 1-in-33,000 — is next to impossible. It’d be millions of times easier, though still very rare, to get four Roulette Wheels to have the same outcome at the same time.

And these are just 4 out of dozens of regions all around the world which saw their death counts fall in the first half of 2020 — as if something, or someone, prevented deaths, or prevented them from being recorded properly (e.g., stuffing death certificates inside of a shoe box, so that you can enter them into the system later).

Reference

[SD of weekly excess death] — Ioannidis JPA, Zonta F, Levitt M. Variability in excess deaths across countries with different vulnerability during 2020-2023. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2023 Dec 5;120(49):e2309557120. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2309557120. Epub 2023 Nov 29. PMID: 38019858; PMCID: PMC10710037. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10710037/