When No Control Group is Necessary
Post #605
Control groups help you to answer the counter-factual:
“But what if I wasn’t in the treatment group? What would my results have been in comparison to how they are now?”
But some accumulations of excess mortality are so high that they defy history, and so they gain an informational sufficiency merely by being unprecedented.
Analogy
If some water began to run uphill — rather than running downhill like water typically does — then a control group (a second body of water, for comparison purposes) would not be necessary in order to make certain that the findings were both substantial and significant.
Breaking with all precedent is already “enough” evidence on its own. It’s not that further investigation would not be useful (more information is almost always better than less information), but it’s just that further investigation would not be necessary.
Water running uphill is already “a story-in-itself.”
When the answer is so obvious it could be considered a fact.
i.e. water is wet
This is that obvious
Another fantastic report!
Question - Was there a reason you picked these jursidictions? With the link is is possible to compare early mortalies (Jan. 31, 2021) ranging from 279 (Hong Kong) to 2,685 (Peru) with those later (July 31, 2022) ranging from 2,632 (Slovenian) to 9,935 (Bulgaria). Wow!
Link to Our World in Data (approx) replicating your chart. https://tinyurl.com/2uh5ezea