Once More Into the Excess Deaths Morass

The Swiss Policy Research Group has done good research during the epidemic.  Their latest paper on excess mortality continues the trend.  The authors say that CV-19 continues to have waves, which don’t show up in testing, because thankfully we aren’t wasting money on CV-19 tests and because if people are curious they just do their own at home.  Those waves may be correlated with higher deaths, at least among the frail elderly.  The researchers further point out that deaths due to heart disease or conditions are linked to respiratory infections, so we are seeing a higher than normal rate of those deaths as well as infections continue to exist in large numbers.  Another cause of increased deaths is drug and alcohol overdoses, which the authors link to the lockdowns, but which in the US are also due to lax border enforcement allowing unlimited amounts of fentanyl in the country.  One feature of the paper is using long-term mortality trends to determine if there was a trend change during the epidemic.  Sweden, for example, did have excess mortality when you look at the longer term trend which was down for years, but the UK has less excess mortality than might appear at first look, because it  had a trend of increasing deaths in the years pre-epidemic.  The paper soundly debunks the notion that vaccines have anything to do with excess deaths.  They demonstrate that countries that for various reasons had low infection rates early in the epidemic, when variants were more deadly, and that vaxed the elderly early on, tended to have the lowest excess mortality.   (SPR Paper)

This paper from France tackles the topic in that country.  These authors went back to 1990 and used different approaches to trend deaths by age and gender and found around an average of 50,000 excess deaths a year for 2020, 2021 and 2022.  As with the prior paper, the authors observed generally declining mortality in France pre-epidemic, so their estimate of excess mortality is lower than that found in other studies, but likely more accurate.  The excess deaths are also fewer than the CV-19 deaths reported in the same period, confirming that many CV-19 deaths were substitutive–many of its victims were going to die anyway.  (Medrxiv Paper)