The Curious Death Deficit in 2020

Post #549

Back in 2020, a curious thing happened for the first 9 weeks: median excess death rates remained negative. Here is a select group:

Excess death rates must always be one of three things: positive, negative, or zero. In the select group above, they were almost always negative. In a larger sample of 54 regions, examined for the first 9 weeks of 2020, no region recorded 0 excess death for any of the weeks.

This turns the experiment into a “coin-flip” — and the baseline expectation is that around 27 out of the 54 regions will have some positive excess death each week, while the other 27 will have some negative excess death.

But the results were nothing even remotely close to 27 of the regions having positive excess death in any of the 9 consecutive weeks under review here. In each of the nine, n=54 weekly samples, somewhere from 33 to 38 of the 54 regions reported negative excess death.

When the probability of consecutive predominance of negative mortality was determined using the weekly negatives as 27 for a Poisson mean, it came to 1.4 * 10^-11.

In long form, that probability is 0.000 000 000 014 — or 14 chances in a trillion. To put that into perspective, over the next 12 months, you are 60,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning (at 848 chances in a billion).

Evidence suggests that nations were playing “fast and loose” with their mortality data for the first 9 weeks of 2020 — because the chance of obtaining the consecutive predominance of negative mortality was too low (p-value = 0.000 000 000 014).

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Regions in the sample

Australia
Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Canada
Chile
Colombia
Croatia
Cyprus
Czechia
Denmark
Ecuador
England & Wales
Estonia
Finland
France
French Guiana
Germany
Greece
Guadeloupe
Guatemala
Hungary
Iceland
Iran
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Latvia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malta
Martinique
Mayotte
Mexico
Montenegro
Netherlands
New Zealand
Northern Ireland
Norway
Peru
Poland
Portugal
Puerto Rico
Reunion
Romania
Scotland
Slovakia
Slovenia
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
United States

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Annual probability of being struck by lightning
Adapted from: https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-odds

From 2009-2018, the average annual death reports from lightning are 27, indicating an average annual strike frequency of 270 (10% of strikes are fatal). The midpoint US population for that time window, using 2013 and 2014, was 318.35 million — for about 1 yearly lightning strike per 1.179 million people (and 848 yearly strikes per billion people).