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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31255 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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Nobody reputable is going to make any (non-deboonky) comment on this, by definition.

A disreputable (but seemingly smart and reasonably good-faith/not crazy) cat has been drawing conclusions from the UK NIH data for some time; the latest is here:

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/uk-age-stratified-all-cause-death

I don't hang my hat on this analysis particularly, and I'm sure there's nits to be picked -- but it's not obviously terrible, and the effect sizes require that the nits be pretty big.

I'd actually be happy to see some reasonable complaints about this one -- on its face it's very concerning, and reasonable explanations are not jumping out at me on first read.

Thank you. This was the direction I was hoping to go in with my top-level post, but people got distracted (understandably so) about which D-list celebrity collapsed for this or that reason.

I'll give this a read, and maybe try to make a different top-level post next week.

OTOH regarding UK death data for 2022 this was just posted. It argues that:

  • once you age-adjust (which takes into account that the expected trend for the mortality rates in aging Western societies would be to rise, there's mostly no excess mortality that wouldn't be explained by Covid)

  • like in most countries, excess mortality spikes follow Covid spikes (though the Fisch argues in other posts for other countries that for this winter the other respiratory diseases almost certainly also show an effect)

  • while there are no not-explainable-by-Covid excess deaths in > 65 age bands, there are some not-explainable-by-Covid excess deaths in < 65 age bands, but these are better explained by NHS being burdened than by vaccination, if you look at schedules

I don't have time to read this analysis any more closely than El Gato's, but it also doesn't seem obviously terrible -- and it kind of doesn't really conflict that much?

In the bar-graphs, the Spring 2022-present deaths still look very concerning if you subtract off the covid bars, especially in the younger age brackets -- Fisch seems to take note of the here, but just kind of... shrugs it off?

I'd also note that Gato is using pretty narrow age bands already, so age-adjustment doesn't seem like it should make much difference.

I'll see if I can do a more adversarial reading later, but again the effect size is really large -- even Fisch notes ~10k excess non-Covid deaths over this period, which seems like kind of a fuckload?

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