You can see the pre pandemic year 2018, and the impact of the flu that year. It was a bad flu year, and at its peak, excess mortality was higher than many times during covid. Flu's pretty serious.
Then during the pandemic, the elevated excess mortality due to covid, but also likely to some extent our responses to covid.
This is a very odd interpretation of the data that you yourself linked, unless I misread your intention or the data you linked
2018 flu season spent about a month at 5000 excess on this chart. We've spent the last two and half years with a typical floor of 5000 excess, except for April of 2021 and 2022. So over the past two and half years, we've had about two months of time that there are fewer excess deaths than the bad 2018 flu season. I agree we are re-approaching nominal as this surge cools down, but the 2021 data shows that even post vaccine and infection granted immunity surges are liable to happen quickly
Excess mortality is not a great measurement for this. Not only is there no clear standard for calculating it across the world, but there are also large errors associated with the data it is calculated from.
A lot of models do not take age distribution into account. For example, if you have a "boomer" generation that is transition into a high-risk-of-dying age group, then the projected number of deaths will be low and the deaths high, making it look like you have a lot of excess mortality.
Slightly more complex models that project the number of deaths from a larger timeframe (for example 5 years) minimize this kind of error, but there are still many more factors to take into account.
EuroMOMO is a European standard for calculating excess mortality. They calculate data variance and thresholds where the model would consider deaths outside of statistical error[1].
Across European 28 countries (420 million people) their model shows[2] a considerable amount of excess deaths in 2020, 2021 and 2022. So according to that model, the pandemic is very much still a present danger.
It’s interesting to me that this story does not try to argue that vaccines and boosters inhibit infection or transmission. At one point this was a key benefit claimed by health authorities and the news media. I think it would be more credible to acknowledge this was wrong (if it was) and explain why the mistake happened.
The article does state that the new booster, like other vaccines, will make hospitalization and death less likely. As someone not at much risk for an Omicron death or hospitalization, I read this article wondering what the takeaway was. It was not very clear. Reading between the lines, it seems to be that older folks and others who are vulnerable should get boosters, including this new one. It doesn’t explicitly say that it is OK for me to skip it, since lack of the booster doesn’t increase (I guess?) my chance of infecting a vulnerable person. But I hate having to guess about these details. Every time I read a muddled article like this I’m less likely to read or trust the next Covid story. I used to be glued to the coverage but now I actively avoid it. I think the media and CDC have handled themselves pretty poorly in terms of clear and well grounded messaging.
The vaccines did inhibit infection and transmission of the earlier strains, which replicated lower in the lungs. They don’t for Omicron, which preferentially replicates in the upper airways, which have less of an immune response. This is why omicron is more transmissible but less deadly. Note that there are nasal spray vaccines in development which stimulate a stronger immune response in that area and potentially restore the transmission-inhibiting ability.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 31.6 ms ] threadThis chart shows excess mortality over the past few years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
You can see the pre pandemic year 2018, and the impact of the flu that year. It was a bad flu year, and at its peak, excess mortality was higher than many times during covid. Flu's pretty serious.
Then during the pandemic, the elevated excess mortality due to covid, but also likely to some extent our responses to covid.
This summer, we're almost back to normal.
2018 flu season spent about a month at 5000 excess on this chart. We've spent the last two and half years with a typical floor of 5000 excess, except for April of 2021 and 2022. So over the past two and half years, we've had about two months of time that there are fewer excess deaths than the bad 2018 flu season. I agree we are re-approaching nominal as this surge cools down, but the 2021 data shows that even post vaccine and infection granted immunity surges are liable to happen quickly
I'm not sure where the 5000 number you cite comes from. The chart I attempted to show was for the US.
A lot of models do not take age distribution into account. For example, if you have a "boomer" generation that is transition into a high-risk-of-dying age group, then the projected number of deaths will be low and the deaths high, making it look like you have a lot of excess mortality.
Slightly more complex models that project the number of deaths from a larger timeframe (for example 5 years) minimize this kind of error, but there are still many more factors to take into account.
EuroMOMO is a European standard for calculating excess mortality. They calculate data variance and thresholds where the model would consider deaths outside of statistical error[1].
Across European 28 countries (420 million people) their model shows[2] a considerable amount of excess deaths in 2020, 2021 and 2022. So according to that model, the pandemic is very much still a present danger.
[1] https://www.euromomo.eu/how-it-works/methods/
[2] https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
The article does state that the new booster, like other vaccines, will make hospitalization and death less likely. As someone not at much risk for an Omicron death or hospitalization, I read this article wondering what the takeaway was. It was not very clear. Reading between the lines, it seems to be that older folks and others who are vulnerable should get boosters, including this new one. It doesn’t explicitly say that it is OK for me to skip it, since lack of the booster doesn’t increase (I guess?) my chance of infecting a vulnerable person. But I hate having to guess about these details. Every time I read a muddled article like this I’m less likely to read or trust the next Covid story. I used to be glued to the coverage but now I actively avoid it. I think the media and CDC have handled themselves pretty poorly in terms of clear and well grounded messaging.