death rates from "respiratory infections" skyrocketed in 2020, but death rates for almost every other category also rose "mildly".
The causes of death that rose:
- cardiovascular
- neuropsychiatric
- unintentional injury
- digestive
- intentional injury
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rate-by-cause-who-mdb
deaths from digestive disease was about 18.75/100k pre-pandemic, and went up to 24/100k in 2021. So digestive deaths increased by about 28% after COVID started hitting.
Also worth mentioning that for every additional person who dies of X, there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of additional people suffering from X
The neuropsychiatric category was on a long-term upward trend, and got a bit of an extra bump in 2020-21. Hard to say whether some of this is the lockdowns that had to be drawn out because they weren't done right.
The cardiovascular category, on the other hand, was on a long-term downward trend, and this was interrupted and reversed by Covid. The other categories might not have a clear mechanism but this one does.
there never was a real lockdown, and the number actually technically increases (by 1/100k) into 2021
so it's prob mostly long-covid brainfog smelloss
literally everything went up except cancer and respdisease, and even cancer shows a very discrete increase in slope
respdiseases went down because people susceptible to it died of covid instead
Context and trends are important.
Are you familiar with exponential decay curves? If it were starting to get close to an asymptote, this is exactly what it would look like.
You can't pull out "but the slope changed" in one category and then ignore how the slope is not really changing in other categories.
The neuropsychiatric category's magnitude in 2021 is colinear with the trend from 1999 to 2019. Intentional injuries are also colinear with the prior 5 years and not aberrant from the flatness since the turn of the century. Infectious and parasitic diseases did not increase (besides a 1-point change one year in a flat trend). Unintentional and intentional injuries, neuropsychiatric conditions, and cardiovascular diseases all had an increase in the middle of last decade, then a plateau, then a regression to the trend. Only cardio is not explained by this regression. Digestive diseases did increase in a proportion just barely (but significantly) outside what the trend had been for the prior 50 years.
Respiratory infections going from 9th to 4th (nearly 3rd, and over half of the #1 cause), along with cardiovascular and digestive diseases reversing their secular trend, is enough cause for concern as it is. You don't need to embellish it by statistically grasping for straws. 2 other causes increasing significantly, 4 increasing insignificantly or not at all, and 2 decreasing, is not "all other causes factually increasing".