Excess Deaths, Corona Collateral Damage

 https://healthy-skeptic.com/2020/11/16/minnesota-excess-deaths/

Lacking an objective media, and an increasingly politicized "science" community, we are forced to attempt to do the work that such our "experts" would be expected to do. Do I endorse the "Healthy Skeptic"? I don't know yet ... I found him through Power Line which I DO endorse (they even admit when they are wrong!) 

Here is a chart of total deaths in US from 2000 up to 2018 from PRB: 

If you follow the link and look at underlying data, 2018 total was 2,839,205. My understanding is there was at least a leveling out, or possibly even a modest drop in 2019 that makes the comparison to 2020 look worse. That "drop" could well be just reporting delay. Anyone who has done any actual statistics work (or even looks at Stock Market charts), knows that the norm is not a straight line. Looking at this chart makes me ask "what went wrong in 2009"? 

If you extrapolate the curve from 2000 to 2018, numbers over 3 million total US deaths would not be surprising at all in the absence of anything unusual. Is that projection "accurate"? Who knows? Extrapolations are used all the time, they often give a "decent idea", sometimes they are completely bogus. In March of 2020, the MSM was giving us the upper bound projections of how may "could" die of Covid "As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die". People under stress are drawn to the worst case.

What caused the increased number of total deaths post 2009?  ... the fact that BO stopped testing for H1N1 when the numbers looked bad comes to mind. 

I can't find much for 2019 data from the CDC or similar sources. I had to chuckle a bit when I saw this from a media "source". 

Data is provided through the 48th week of 2020. So far this year, the CDC reports that 2,877,601 people have died. At the same point in 2018, the number was 2,606,928, and in 2019, it was 2,614,950. The number of deaths to this point in 2020 is at least 260,000 greater than either of the past two years. But that number is an underestimate because the CDC publishes data based on the number of death certificates it has received. Since it can take a couple of weeks for all death certificates to be recorded, the numbers for the last two weeks at least, will increase as time goes by. If the last two weeks produce a similar number of deaths as the weeks before, the margin to this point will actually be close to 310,000.

"The linked article paints a dire picture. As many as "310,000" total deaths "to this point"! Who says death can't be funny! (certainly not Monty Python). The total death number are not reliable until a decent amount of time after the end of a given year. Massive bureaucracies don't have much of a reputation for either speed nor accuracy. The stats back to even the early 2000's are regularly "adjusted", much like temperature trends for AGW. Given the trend from 2009, these are not unexpected numbers without Covid. 

People don't understand numbers in general, and certainly not big numbers without context, they are basically meaningless. I had no idea what the total number of deaths in the US per year was up to today. I had even less idea about any trends. In a sane unbiased world, one of the huge responsibilities of media and government is to provide CONTEXT. When they don't, it is a great clue that they are lying to you and spewing propaganda.

Here is a chart of deaths from all causes in the US up to the middle of 2020 from CDC. It shows that in the context of other years, the increase is not really as frightening as the media-government complex would lead us to believe. High 2 millions, low 3 millions is within what one would expect absent a virus. Even if it was "out of trend line" like 2009, jumping to "it's Covid" as a conclusion is hardly warranted -- no more than my biased inkling that H1N1 was a major cause in 2009.

The short answer appears to be that we are NOT "off the trend line" for total deaths from ALL CAUSES. To add even more confusion to these numbers, something appears to have happened in 2009. It could be suicide, it could be opioids,  in could be H1N1, or a host of other things, but if you believe the CDC, it happened. 

The following chart shows Minnesota excess deaths from causes not claimed to be "caused by Corona" ... so therefore, quite likely to be Corona panic collateral damage. The response to Covid certainly caused excess death -- way too early to speculate how much, but we know that isolation, fear, and delayed medical procedures are going to push total deaths up. The linked is worth a look.