Comments - State of Affairs: Oct 12
1) No, they are still using projections based on previous years it appears, and that's consistent with how Human Mortality Database continues to project expected deaths. There are fair arguments to both viewpoints, but at some point we will have to incorporate the last 3 years into our projections for fidelity.
Unfortunately, the CDC stopped publishing dozens of weekly reports on Covid, but the most recent snapshot of mortality (published 9/27, but due to lag I would only trust ~week 32/Aug 12) showed 55,306 deaths (all cause), which is 3,557 more deaths than the same week pre-pandemic of 2019. If you compare week 32 of 2019 to the same time difference of 4 years (2015) the gap is the same - 3,555 more deaths between the 4 years. Make sense?
2) It's a viable theory (I've heard it under other names), and one I believed to be true early in the pandemic, but I haven't seen it supported by mortality data as strongly as I expected.
I also am not seeing it in historical data. Consider the Spanish Flu, in the US the number of deaths leading to it:
1915 - 815K
1916 - 925K
1917 - 981K
Now Spanish Flu hits and it jumps to 1,430,000 million deaths, a 50% increase
You would expect if the "Harvesting Effect" holds true, that once the Spanish Flu fades, you would see some year in the future - perhaps 1920 - drop under a million, even potentially dipping to 800K.
You don't see that. 1919 was 1,072,000 deaths, then 1,118,000 in 1920, and 1,009,000 in 1921, and so forth. (even comparing in rates to factor in population growth you don't see reversal- they just stay elevated-flat)
We also don't see it with Covid so far. Sweden entered the pandemic with their lowest recorded deaths in 20 years for 2019, so you would expect a small bounce up in 2020 even without Covid, but in 2020 they saw a +10% increase in all cause mortality, the following years merely returned back to baseline - no dip to compensate for the earlier peak.
Same in South Korea, 2022 had a 17% increase in deaths, but so far in 2023 they are still +13% ahead of baseline - so not only didn't they see a decrease to compensate the 2022 large bounce, they are still highly elevated in death.
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