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Been wondering about this. Won’t excess mortality also pick up deaths from people delaying/avoiding treatment for other stuff? Unclear how to control for that
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Worth reading. The excess mortality tracker is a decent way to bypass underestimates around testing and bureaucratic dishonesty. “In many countries, these excess deaths exceed reported numbers of Covid-19 deaths by large margins.” ft.com/content/a26fbf 1/5
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Paramedics in the UK are reporting that they are have to deal with many many more deaths at home. No autopsies so causes not known. Some will be covid; some from delaying seeking help for fear of contagion; some likely covid-related - medication, food, falls while alone ....
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My understanding is that those deaths are included in the count of annual flu deaths. By that standard it’s reasonable to include them in COVID excess mortality, though that might not give the number you’re looking for.
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in emerging countries you get lower deaths from accidents, suicides, murders, driving.... hard to believe “avoiding treatment” is causing nore deaths
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Don’t control for it. The real number of deaths caused by Covid should also include indirect deaths, just like when we track deaths from natural disasters we include people who have heart attacks or accidents because they were fleeing.
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Can't control, but can make inferences from the key stylised facts of age/sex/location distribution. In UK, high-ish correlation of non C19 excess with C29 excess by geography, very low with sex (non C19 excess is exactly like base, not like C19), and variable by age.
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