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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15311 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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He also just released The Evidence That A Million Americans Died Of COVID.

I went and looked into the death rate a little more. Found this graph of the trend. Here is a fun game: spot when covid starts.

There has been a year over year increase in the death rate by about 1% starting in 2014 and hasn't started shrinking much until 2024. What the hell is going on?

I have a suspicion that old people have just been getting older. And that those old people are dying more during flu season. And that the excess death chart from 2018-2019 would line up pretty well with an excess death chart from 2020-2021. But that would probably take a lot of effort to figure out. I dont even know where to get month to month death numbers, tried asking some AI to help me find it, but sounds like its not publicly available.

edit: data i found is bad, nybbler has better data below.

Your data is wrong. Actual data.

There's a data quality issue in here, and I'm not sure on which side. Scott's "annual deaths" graph shows a sharp uptick for Covid. Yours does not.

There's also the "harvesting" effect - many people who died from Covid did not have long left. I am most interested in what effect Covid has on the 10 year moving average of total deaths.

If there's a harvesting effect, it has not shown up. The crude death rate just returned (roughly) to pre-COVID trend in 2023. It is possible COVID has added permanently to disease burden.

Fuckin Boomers man -- the "annual % change" on your link flips positive (slightly) in 2009, 15 years before 2024.

Fifteen years into the baby boom was 1960, by which time births were well off peak and on the decline:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/United_States_Birth_Rates.svg/800px-United_States_Birth_Rates.svg.png

Sad!

There are a ton of confounding variables here, but IIRC we're finally seeing a significant decrease in opioid deaths (a surprisingly high count) in ways that might be significant but were rising well before COVID. The reasons are a bit unclear (dark prospect: populations particularly vulnerable to addiction have largely died already).

But surprisingly few care substantially about overdoses (or traffic accidents) because, I suppose, that's something that happens to "other people". Nobody really cares about addicts in practice, judging by the relative alarm compared with COVID. I try to care, at least abstractly, about causes of death (and non-death harm) but I'm not sure the loud "harm reduction" advocates have actually been helpful either.

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