A 25 meter tall Nordic spruce, dead and dried-out but still standing is felled by gusts topping 30m/s. It lands at a 45 degree angle, its top third caught in a cleft in a birch tree and its bottom end a rotted stump lodged in 1½ meter of snow. The end touching the ground is ½ a meter in diameter.
How and where do you cut to to:
A) Dislodge the entire tree?
B) Do so without danger to yourself?
C) Using only manual tools.
The difference between my model and the ONS is, if you mess up when applying it, you personally /will/ get hurt.
I wonder what would happen if you looked at the distribution of age-at-death (a generalized “life expectancy”) over time. If its central location is declining, then there’s “excess death”. No doubt insurance actuaries have such things, and have a powerful incentive to be correct.
Theoretically, if a population is exposed to a highly infectious novel virus that preferentially kills the elderly and infirm (those most at risk of death during the next 5 years), isn’t the expected outcome a lower than normal mortality rate over the next 5 years?
Now, the peculiar thing to me is that if you do not see the expected suppression in deaths, the natural explanation is that either the virus was not as lethal as you thought or that it has long-term longevity-suppressing effects even among survivors. Both seem to be to be reasonable accusations to lob at Covid. It also is reasonable, in this case, to say that the pandemic response was unequivocally bad for public health, increasing obesity, depression, drug abuse, anxiety, lack of physical activity/time outdoors, and social isolation.
I honestly am not sure whether it is the latter that the data seeks to obscure— just how bad our public health response was even pre-jab— or whether the vaccine is continuing to have a significant population-level effect on mortality. (It has compromised the health of many who took it, but modern medicine is great at prolonging the lives of people who have heart attacks and strokes— I suspect if it were the jab alone we’d have to wait a decade or more to see a clear signal in the mortality data. Which is why the claims of “safe and effective,” even if they turned out to be true, were a lie at the time.)
Here's how I model expectations using math:
A 25 meter tall Nordic spruce, dead and dried-out but still standing is felled by gusts topping 30m/s. It lands at a 45 degree angle, its top third caught in a cleft in a birch tree and its bottom end a rotted stump lodged in 1½ meter of snow. The end touching the ground is ½ a meter in diameter.
How and where do you cut to to:
A) Dislodge the entire tree?
B) Do so without danger to yourself?
C) Using only manual tools.
The difference between my model and the ONS is, if you mess up when applying it, you personally /will/ get hurt.
I wonder what would happen if you looked at the distribution of age-at-death (a generalized “life expectancy”) over time. If its central location is declining, then there’s “excess death”. No doubt insurance actuaries have such things, and have a powerful incentive to be correct.
They’re not dead. They’re just resting while pining for the fjords.
Theoretically, if a population is exposed to a highly infectious novel virus that preferentially kills the elderly and infirm (those most at risk of death during the next 5 years), isn’t the expected outcome a lower than normal mortality rate over the next 5 years?
Now, the peculiar thing to me is that if you do not see the expected suppression in deaths, the natural explanation is that either the virus was not as lethal as you thought or that it has long-term longevity-suppressing effects even among survivors. Both seem to be to be reasonable accusations to lob at Covid. It also is reasonable, in this case, to say that the pandemic response was unequivocally bad for public health, increasing obesity, depression, drug abuse, anxiety, lack of physical activity/time outdoors, and social isolation.
I honestly am not sure whether it is the latter that the data seeks to obscure— just how bad our public health response was even pre-jab— or whether the vaccine is continuing to have a significant population-level effect on mortality. (It has compromised the health of many who took it, but modern medicine is great at prolonging the lives of people who have heart attacks and strokes— I suspect if it were the jab alone we’d have to wait a decade or more to see a clear signal in the mortality data. Which is why the claims of “safe and effective,” even if they turned out to be true, were a lie at the time.)