The Center for Disease Control has compiled and released the excess death data for 2020 that gives us a better handle on Covid. The first charts give a bit of a handle on what was happening:
There are a couple of interesting conclusions – first is that about a third of the excess deaths are not due to covid. The second is that either the virus treats hispanic and black people different than whites, or that there are intervening variables or spurious correlations. First, let’s look at the charts by age cohorts
They confirm that Covid was a greater threat to older folks than younger – just like the statistics have been showing us. Next, let’s look at the charts by race and hispanic ethnicity:
I’m not real sure about the relationship based on hispanic ethnicity – one of my colleagues qualifies as hispanic, but mostly Apache ancestry. Gina is hispanic, but both parents were born in Spain. Heck, genetically I have some Spanish or Portuguese ancestry, and my people otherwise come from Scotland and points north of there. On the other hand, I’m waiting for the research that explains the extreme deaths in the category.
The lower left chart shows that the disease did not hit the white population so hard – which intrigues me because that is the oldest of the groups. I’ll be waiting for more data before I make any inferences.
So click the link, read the CDC article, and start wondering – what hit us half as hard as covid at the same time?
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