How "Real" is the Covid-19 Pandemic?

Yes, it's been a long time. No excuses. But, here we go. No one will dispute that the arrival of Covid-19 has disrupted almost every facet of life in every corner of the world. And yet, just as in almost every aspect of life in the United States these days, Covid-19 has become a political battlefield. As would be expected, the right considers that mask mandates, vaccine mandates, quarantines, lockdowns, and other measures imposed by various governments at all levels are an infringement on freedom, and useless at best and counterproductive at worst. And the left characterizes the right as conspiratorial, intransigent, destructive to society and more. They consider that the measures railed against by the right are common sense, effective measures and that compliance with such measures is necessary for the greater societal good, albeit with serious negative collateral damage.

I'm not an epidemiologist, virologist, statistician, doctor of any type, or public health expert (whatever that may mean). But it seemed to me that it should be possible to, at least, determine if a real thing has happened. In trying to understand the data that's available, one can find numbers for cases, infections, death rates, deaths attributed to Covid-19, positivity rate and many others. However, the one number in which I have at least some confidence is the simple number of deaths. Death certificates are a binary data point - someone died or did not.

I use the Human Mortality Database, a database that is updated weekly and has all cause deaths for 38 countries, separated into age groups. One can download the current data in spreadsheet form. The U.S. data goes back to 2015 and is sourced from the CDC. I started downloading this data most weeks over the last couple of years. In the beginning, I only wanted to see if there was a noticeable increase in overall ("all-cause") deaths. Below is a chart of this data from the beginning of the database through the first week of 2022 (the data is a few weeks behind as reports are gathered). Note that it is NOT zero scaled.

The abscissa is the number of weeks since the beginning of data (2015) through week one of 2022. The ordinate is the total number of deaths for each week in the United States. You'll note some interesting points. Among them is the very clear annual periodicity. Also, midway in the chart, you can see the evidence of the very bad flu season in the winter of 2017 - 2018. Finally, the very high numbers at the right end of the chart begin, when one would expect the numbers to begin falling in accordance with the periodicity in the spring of 2020, to climb in fairly spectacular fashion.

The next chart shows each year as its own set of points, though I didn't include all years as the chart is already busy enough. I included 2017 through 2022. Again, the ordinate is not zero scaled.

It's easy to see that there the data is very consistent by year for 2017, 2018, and 2019 (though the 2017 - 2018 flu season is clearly visible). The various "waves" (initial wave in the spring of 2020, the summer wave of that year, the Delta variant wave, and the Omicron variant wave) are also clearly visible.

That led me to think that it would be easy to estimate what people refer to as "excess deaths" attributable to the pandemic. Now, as an aside, I recognize that many excess deaths were not directly due to Covid-19 infections. There have been deaths due to people not getting diagnosis or treatment for heart disease, cancer, kidney disease, etc. due to lockdowns or lack of hospital facilities. There have been suicides and drug overdoses due to depression and idle time. There have been deaths that are likely attributable to vaccinations. I haven't checked, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that automobile fatalities rose due to much less traffic on freeways and consequent higher speeds leading to more severe accidents. Nevertheless, it's clear that the pandemic has greatly increased the number of deaths beyond what would have previously been expected.

I took an extremely naive approach. It's clear that, even if nothing else changes, there will be more deaths as population increases. So, for each week, I took the mid-year population for each of the years of 2017, 2018, and 2019 and multiplied the deaths for that week and year by the ratio between that number and the equivalent number in 2020, 2021, and 2022. I then subtracted the mean of the adjusted deaths for the week in 2017, 2018, and 2019 from the 2020, 2021, and 2022 deaths for that week number. I estimated the result to be the number of excess deaths in that week for that year. I then totalled the numbers for each year, resulting in the following:

Year	Excess deaths
2020	504,562
2021	571,400
2022	8,946

Based on this, admittedly rather superficial, analysis, it's reasonable to estimate that on the order of 1,085,000 people have died beyond what would have been expected prior to the pandemic. This number compares quite well with other estimates I've seen of Covid-19 deaths.

I'll make another post with some breakdowns by age but, suffice it to say for now, that the numbers are very heavily skewed toward the highest age groups. So, in terms of lost years of life, the numbers above overstate the situation. Nevertheless, even as recently as the first week of this year, we're still significantly above the adjusted mean of more normal years. If we think that the very old and infirm were already not far from their demise and thus, the pandemic, in a sense, culled the herd, we'd expect a time to come post-pandemic when the total deaths drop noticeably below the adjusted mean for more normal years. I see no sign of that at this time.