The lil'est pandemic: Global excess deaths by region

Clarifying the scale of the stakes, and evidence regarding vaccine efficacy against death

Global excess deaths support the narrative, but place it in perspective

Yesterday, I discovered the work of Philip Schellekens, not by any means a “Covid skeptic.”

Schellekens has operated “pandem-ic.com” since at least 2021 to highlight, er, viral equity, in order to advocate, er, unclear notions of anti-viral equity, or something. At any rate Schellekens is not seeking to minimize the impact of the virus on humanity; far from it. And… I like some of his work. Specifically, I like the post “COVID-19 did not subvert global health,” first published in late 2022, which seeks to dispel the trope that lower-income countries have been unscathed by the so-called pandemic™.

Here is Schellekens’ comparison of officially reported per-100,000 “Covid deaths,” on the left, vs. excess mortality (compiled by The Economist via official death statistics or indirect measures, depending on region), on the right, across the globe:

from pandem-ic.com

Forgive the cluttered labeling. Schellekens’ point here is that Southern Africa and Southern Asia have likely experienced a higher toll than reported “Covid deaths” would suggest. I agree; I think India in particular hasn’t been reporting cases and deaths accurately, which makes data on both treatment and disease outcomes there unreliable (sorry, ivermectin). But let’s focus now on the West.

In North America, per The Economist: Just-under 400 cumulative excess deaths for every 100,000 souls.

Or, 4 for every 1,000.

This is very close to what “Ben” at usmortality.com reports for the US alone:

from usmortality.com

Note the sharpest slopes: April, 2020; December, 2020; August, 2021; January, 2022.

Hashing out my own values from the CDC’s Wonder dataset, I get a slightly higher result (due to not pricing in the aging trend). 4.61 excess deaths per 1,000 Americans; with spikes around the same months:

shared at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1J3-8pmtT5DPujUiPsskgn0PSzrxkRKnSnAifRspDYIk/edit?usp=sharing

On the left, 2018 and 2019 and a crude average of the two. On the right, 2020 - 2022. In the middle, monthly extra deaths on the right vs. the average on the left.

Three years, about 1.5 extra deaths per 1,000 Americans each year.

What is the source of these ~4 extra deaths per k?

A) Virus, B) reaction to the same, or C) vaccine?

Before you answer, consider Australia and New Zealand, which had more of B) reaction and more of C) vaccine per-capita than the US; but kept out A) virus until C) vaccine was all dished out:

Much was made and continues to be made of the supposedly embarrassing fact that all of Australia’s reported Covid deaths follow C) vaccine (and the abatement of B) reaction). From Berenson's recent most-ever-liked-post:¹

Countries like Canada and South Korea and Australia - where 99 percent of people over 70 were vaccinated by the beginning of 2022 - had more Covid deaths in 2022 than ever before.

(If this is vaccine success, I’d hate to see failure:)

SOURCE

Alright, but Australia has only racked up ~.8 excess deaths per 1,000 in all this time, vs. the USA’s 4. And 21,000 total excess deaths, as a high estimate, in a country of 26 million, just isn’t a lot.

Berenson says he would “hate to see failure.” Has he seen America, since his hip-fired prediction in January, 2021 that the Covid vaccines would prove ineffective?

source: @AlexBerenson (twitter.com)

You must pick one, either minimize or deny!

My point, as always, on the matter of severe efficacy and virus deaths is that if you can’t acknowledge them, you can’t argue that “the other side’s” extremist conclusions aren’t implied by them.

This is why I have always felt, and still feel, that those who want to outright deny that the virus is driving excess deaths, or deny that experimental transfections that confer antibodies (at least maybe) reduce severe disease, have lost the plot. If you are denying those things are true, you cannot make an argument that their truth is irrelevant to the questions of freedom, autonomy, economic flourishing, experimentation on human biology including of pregnant mothers and children — you can’t really say anything about any of that.

Even if you do say you have concerns on those questions, you throw those concerns out the window because you won’t stand by them.

Denying that the virus kills is failing to argue that we should still have freedom, and avoid experimenting on humanity, anyway.

Denying that the experimental vaccines maybe reduce severe disease is failing to argue that we should still have freedom, and avoid experimenting on humanity, anyway.

It would be one thing if those denials had merit. But the evidence does not suggest the case is remotely strong.

Australia turned into a hermit kingdom of rampant, coercive medical experimentation — and fewer people died.

Does this mean that becoming a hermit kingdom of rampant, coercive medical experimentation is good? Or does it mean not becoming that thing is worth 1.5 more people in a thousand dying every year?

I would argue the latter.

Of the US, I would argue that more would have died without the transfections, given first that our comorbidities outstrip what prevails in Southern Africa and Asia, and second that most Americans did not get infected until after injection (since thanks either to the lockdowns or to deficiencies in the virus that had to be worked out via mutation, few people were actually infected in 2020 outside of nursing homes in New York and New Jersey). Maybe I’m wrong about that; but it doesn’t matter, my bid is placed on being right as a hedge.

There is no (realistic) number of deaths per 1,000 that would convince me lockdowns and rampant experimentation on humanity are a good deal.

I do not need to deny that the virus kills or that the vaccines (maybe) reduce severe disease. Life was going to move on regardless. History would have forgotten this virus as quickly as we have forgotten the “tripledemic” that crowded pediatric hospitals mere months ago.

If we are all, in our individual connections, members of a village of 1,000, SARS-CoV-2 was never capable of being more than a minor tragedy, akin to a single house fire. Should villages stop making houses to avoid house fires? Stop cooking food? Randomly try new fuels and hope for the best? (Great if you get away with it once, but what about the next night, and the next?)

How much thoughtless, panicked disruption is enough, just to avoid the reality that in life, sometimes people die?

If you derived value from this post, please drop a few coins in your fact-barista’s tip jar.

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1. Berenson, Alex. “On friendship with self-righteous cowards.” (2023, May 1.) Unreported Truths.