Excess COVID Death (part 2)

Excess all cause death in heavily vaccinated nations is making global headlines. In this mini-series I derive a measure for excess COVID death.

In part 1 of this series I introduced a variable I’m calling case detection rate (CDR), this being a proxy for disease prevalence that takes into account the widely varying number of viral tests that have taken place over time. Test 1,000 folk and you’ll find a few COVID cases; test 10,000,000 folk and you’ll find a few more cases. Hence CDR, which is derived as rolling 7-day COVID cases per 100 viral tests (the ‘rolling’ bit avoids artefact arising from weekly admin patterns).

We ended-up comparing certified COVID deaths with CDR and noted an excellent agreement over time indicating COVID cases may indeed sometimes end in COVID death. The agreement was not perfect, however, and we pondered on why COVID deaths spiked at a time when CDR did not - how can large numbers of people be dying of COVID if it wasn’t rampant as a disease? I suggested we derive the ratio of rolling 7-day certified COVID deaths to CDR and take a look at this time series for clues. Here is that time series: