BREAKING NEWS - I have received the very latest Irish death registration data, as of the end of August.
Here's a thread, with lots of charts πππ.
If you think this information is important, please give it a retweet!
I'm going to focus on the months from January to May.
There were allegedly 1,646 "Covid-19-related" deaths in this period (mostly in April).
Here's the raw data, added up for each year. Does 2020 stand out to you?
Now let's adjust March, April and May 2020 for future registrations, based on how many late registrations usually show up in the data.
I forecast another c. 450 deaths will be registered for these three months.
This still leaves total deaths below the same period in 2018.
The green line in this chart illustrates a mild start to 2020, followed by a bad April.
Three competing explanations for April:
1) closure of the healthcare system 2) seasonal patterns (mild recent winters, 2019 & 2020, unusually large numbers of vulnerable people) 3) Covid-19
Now let's make the analysis more meaningful by accounting for Ireland's growing population.
The data suggests that the death rate in Ireland from January to May 2020 was very possibly below average, compared to the prior five years.
2015, 2016, 2018 all appear more dangerous.
Indeed, 2019 is the most unusual year in the series, not 2020. 2019 was exceptionally mild.
This backs up the idea there may have been unusually large numbers of vulnerable people in early 2020.
If we exclude 2019 when calculating the average, 2020 is further below average:
To help you see why the official Covid-19 death toll is so questionable, here's the same chart if we deduct the 1,646 "Covid-19-related" deaths from January to May 2020.
If we do that, then 2020 becomes the outlier, with far fewer deaths even than the outlier 2019. Implausible!
I can also put the April 2020 result in context.
Despite the shutdown of the health service in April 2020, its death rate appears lower than both Jan 2017 and Jan 2018.
They were considered to be normal times - the media said almost nothing about death statistics back then!
CONCLUSION:
Despite the shutdown of the healthcare system, mild recent winters leaving more vulnerable people in the population, and the alleged presence of a virus that threatens a societal catastrophe, overall mortality in Ireland in 2020 has been normal.
END
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These are the most important things I've learned, and which I apply in my day-to-day routine.
If everyone did these things, their lifestyles would be transformed:
1) assign every dollar (or pound, or euro) a specific job. Like a person, if money is left idle, it will get up to no good.
Do this every month with a written budget, preferably using an app that links to your bank accounts so that your transactions automatically show up there.
2) plan for your major expenses such as cars, holidays, and household improvements.
Putting cash aside for them every single month means not having to go into debt for them later (or liquidating your long-term investments, which is almost as bad).
The incoming auto-enrolment system in Ireland sounds horrible:
- a quasi-mandatory system, reducing take-home pay even more for employees.
- even higher costs for employers.
- a huge new govt subsidy for pensions (how can they afford to do this but not to cut income tax?)
1/5
- govt subsidies are applied equally regardless of tax bracket, so a pension becomes another form of income redistribution.
- money gets locked up in the system for 40+ years.
- new central processing authority to administer it, creating more unnecessary civil servant jobs.
2/5
- the existing PRSI deduction was already supposed to provide a decent pension. But there will be no change to PRSI.
- there will only be FOUR investment funds to choose from, for the entire country! An amazing lack of choice. Maybe let people invest their own money?
3/5
Ireland's "Commission on Taxation and Welfare" has triggered outrage with alleged proposals to reduce inheritance tax relief, raise diesel duty, etc.
As with NPHET, the likely purpose of COTW is to float bad ideas, so that government can see which ones are viable.
A shortπ§΅.
Media reports have disclosed the alleged proposals from COTW, but have said almost nothing about who or what COTW is. The ordinary reader is left wondering who to blame for all of the bad ideas.
This is where I come in with a relevant link and a summary.
We can now calculate Ireland's death rates for every age group and for every year up to and including 2021, with the help of freshly released CSO figures and the CSO's population estimates.
I've done this. Some interesting results:
πππ
Firstly, Covid-19 coincided with Ireland's 85+ population achieving their lowest ever death rates in each of the past two years.
An amazing result in the circumstances:
The results are only slightly less positive for the grey-haired 65-84 cohort.
Three out of the four categories here had a small increase in 2021 over the prior year.
But 2021 was still safer for every category in this cohort compared to 2018: