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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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It seems there is a box on a form that you check if the person is pregnant, and they have been counting every single death of a pregnant person as a maternal death. Shoot, they included a lot of men in those stats too apparently. Even if the death didn't have anything to do with being pregnant or delivering a baby.

This is also how covid deaths work in most places. In the UK, it was 28 days within a positive test (initially, it was anyone who ever died after getting covid, which would have given covid a 100% mortality rate) . Given that some % of people will die within 28 days regardless, this will overestimate covid deaths. During the height of mass testing mania, so many people were testing positive for covid, and so few dying, that it implied that up to 40% of published deaths were just a quirk of counting people who tested positive before being hit by a bus. My own calculation of this.

This is about the standard level of death statistics you should expect. Covid dashboards may have cultivated the impression that orgs like the CDC have ultra-precise data about the cause of every single death ever, but besides that not being true for covid, it's also not true for much else either.

Take for instance the flu. Supposedly covid is far less deadly than the flu. Probably so, but this claim depends on two things. First, covid data. Second, flu data. Do we have the data on the latter? Yes, but it's not very good. Covid monomania left us with far better data about covid even by mid-2020. The CDC has moderately confident data about how many people die of flu, very weak data about how many people get flu, and therefore only a weak idea of what the mortality rate of flu is.