Thread by @lymanstoneky

US excess deaths appear to be remaining stubbornly high.

Could still just be a time lag before falling cases generate falling deaths. Could also be excessive upward revisions in my model. Hard to say exactly.

Here's deaths in the rolling 12 month period vs. expected deaths in that period from previous trends. As you can see, our current pandemic is really edging towards 1918.

wE fLaTtEnNeD tHe CuRvE

more seriously, what's actually going on here is as highly-disease-susceptible old people make up a growing share of society, the "potentially mortality risk" from epidemic disease rises considerably.

a big reason historic societies had bad epidemics is *a huge population share was children*, and children die of disease more easily than adults.

but in the 20th century we had this epoch where prime-age adults made up a huge share of the population.

obviously, medical advances were a big part of the story too, but mere shift in population composition explains a nontrivial share of the time trend in infectious disease mortality burdens.

but now we're on the other side of that change and... we have a growing share of highly susceptible people likely to die of infectious diseases.

so infectious disease problems are likely to *increase* in the future.