Day 934: Excess Mortality, CDC Edition

After months of agitating on Twitter, the Ethical Skeptic has finally posted to his blog about American excess mortality and the CDC's delinquent death data:

Finally, we end with the most important chart of all – the chart which indicates deaths which are not from accidents, suicide, addiction, assault, abuse, despair, disruption, nor Covid-19. The Excess Non-Covid Natural Cause Mortality chart which we began monitoring on May 29th 2021. What I called then, the ‘What the hell is this?’ chart. As one can see, we have lost 344,000 younger Americans to something besides Covid and non-natural death, during the period from 3 April 2021 to 6 August 2022. The current rate of mortality in this ICD categorization, is around 5,000 or more per week (the database shows a most recent five-week, weekly average of 7,887 deaths – subject to lag of course) – which exceeds most weeks of the Covid pandemic itself (save for the absolute peak periods).

By now, if all these mortality excesses were indeed a holdover from Covid-19 itself, they should have already begun to tail off. Unfortunately they are not only not tailing off, in many cases they are still increasing.

Accordingly, and without a shadow of a doubt, we have established that right now there exists a problem in terms of US citizen health and mortality. One which is differentiated from Covid-19 itself, and began in earnest MMWR Week 14 of 2021. Our next task, and what will be outlaid in Parts 2 and 3 of this article series, is to employ these and other observed arrival distributions to winnow out the causal mechanism(s) behind this concerning trend in US mortality.

Having made significant progress on the second and third article already, we very much look forward to publishing for the reader, our next article in the series, ‘Houston, We Know the Mechanisms (Part 2 of 3)’.