Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Ok, Denninger is on the conspiracy theory that the CDC's data is dishonest or being interpreted inaccurately. The oh no covid is not killing klan!! The "excess deaths" business.

"let's talk when you get to COPD and Lupus"

It's been dealt with here .. Fact check: Chart does not present accurate US deaths figure for 2020
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=162973673 .

And here .. Fact check: The US saw more deaths in 2020 than in 2019, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=161991317

Here .. 574,000 More U.S. Deaths Than Normal Since Covid-19 Struck
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=162971703

And here .. Flawed Analysis Leads to False Claim of ‘No Excess Deaths’ in 2020

By Angelo Fichera

Posted on December 3, 2020

Quick Take

With links

An economics professor’s flawed interpretation of U.S. mortality data has prompted a viral, false claim that COVID-19 hasn’t led to more deaths than normal this year. In fact, multiple analyses have found there to be a higher-than-normal number of deaths during the pandemic — as much as 20%, according to some studies.
Full Story

Viral headlines and social media posts are propelling the erroneous claim that there have been “no excess deaths” in the U.S. this year, suggesting that concern over COVID-19 is overblown.

That’s wrong.

As we’ve previously explained, excess deaths are deaths above the number expected in a given time period. The metric in the context of COVID-19 can help assess the impact of the pandemic, including by capturing direct and indirect effects of the virus. It can account for unreported COVID-19 deaths and for other factors — such as people dying from other causes, say avoiding medical attention, as well as drops in other deaths due to pandemic-related restrictions.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in October published a report that found that from late January through Oct. 3, there were an estimated 299,028 excess deaths. Two-thirds were estimated to be directly attributed to COVID-19.

The COVID-19 death toll has surpassed 275,000, as of Dec. 3, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Cases are rising around the country, and projections anticipate that the death count will climb past 300,000 by the end of the year.

The viral claim about “no excess deaths” — which has been amplified by unreliable websites and disseminated on Facebook and Twitter — stems from an online presentation by an economics lecturer at Johns Hopkins. But it’s flawed for multiple reasons, experts say.

In a Nov. 13 webinar, Genevieve Briand, the assistant director for the university’s Applied Economics master’s program, looked at select CDC data, such as weekly reported deaths, to reach the faulty conclusion that there is “no evidence that COVID-19 create[d] any excess deaths.”

“Total death number are not above normal death numbers,” she claims. “We found no evidence to the contrary.”

Her claims were then relayed in a story in the Johns Hopkins News-Letter, a student-run publication, which said the analysis showed COVID-19 “has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.” The publication later retracted the report. An archived version of the story, however, has been shared on Facebook 10,000 times according to CrowdTangle analytics data.

The student publication’s retraction also became part of the false narrative online, triggering claims that the university had published a “study” then retracted it. “Johns Hopkins Study Mysteriously Disappears after it Revealed, In Spite of COVID, No More Deaths in 2020 Than In Prior Years,” read the false headline on the Gateway Pundit, a far-right website known for spreading misinformation.

Briand, however, confirmed in an email to us that she had not published her analysis anywhere apart from the webinar. The video is still available on YouTube, where it’s been viewed more than 58,000 times. Briand told us she stood by her analysis.

But Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Population Health at the Virginia Commonwealth University, told us that “multiple studies have shown that total deaths in the US are about 20% higher than expected.”

Woolf and colleagues relayed as much in an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in October. “Although total US death counts are remarkably consistent from year to year, US deaths increased by 20% during March-July 2020,” the authors wrote.

Studies from others, including a paper by two University of Oxford economists, have reached similar conclusions.

Woolf said in an email that the lecture video instead presented a “very unsophisticated analysis, in which the speaker uses crude death counts for one year (2018) as the basis for comparison and performs simple subtraction from 2020 values for her assertions. Any reputable analysis of excess deaths is based on statistical modeling that computes seasonal averages over a period of many years, and this is done to adjust for random variation from year to year.”

“For example, our studies use Poisson regression modeling. Statistical modeling is necessary to know whether differences in death counts are statistically significant,” he said. “The speaker admits to merely eyeballing the trend lines for 2020. Researchers prefer to use statistical modeling to know whether a supposed change in counts is random variation or a statistically significant trend.”

The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics excess death analysis (which uses such modeling) has found deaths above normal rates week after week since the end of March — as readers can see in the center’s chart below.

More - https://www.factcheck.org/2020/12/flawed-analysis-leads-to-false-claim-of-no-excess-deaths-in-2020/

I'll still read Denninger's his as will likely learn more.