For those at @SOActuaries Life Meeting in New Orleans right now - check out Session 10C: Excess Mortality - A Peek Under the Iceberg...

...you may see some very familiar graphs!

(and some new ones I made) I'm not going to be there (I'm still in NY right now... CT later) but yes, I made a lot of the graphs

Such as - yes, there's continuing heightened mortality in 2023, esp. among younger adults

Political Mortality: Revisiting Supposed Excess Republican Mortality, by @meepbobeep

I wrote about the preprint in October 2022, but we may as well rehash why this is all bullshitopen.substack.com/pub/marypatcam… There are loads of technical weaknesses with the paper itself:

- the input data (especially political party identification) is fairly weak. Especially Ohio.

I am in NY state - which has the most locked-down primaries. You've got to be registered for the party 1yr in advance

Time for a twitter thread on the increase in mortality for teens in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021 -- analysis by cause of death

marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/childhood-mo…

There was an increase in rates from 2019 to 2021 -- you want to see what caused it? Before really digging into it -- will not be talking about younger age groups, though they're at the link. Their mortality rates barely budged in 2020 and 2021

Also, yes, these rates are low -- per 100,000 per year, so the mortality rate is like 0.04% in 2021 for teens

I'm always bad news when I'm posting on LinkedIn

bwa ha ha ha

I love it, bc most of the people I know are trying the "positivity vibes" influencer stuff, even the life actuaries.

and I'm going hard-core life actuary which means

DEAAAAAAAAAAATH To be sure, pre-pandemic, there were loads of positive mortality trends

but not now

(Grandpa Simpson whispering deaaaaaaaath)

Okay, since everybody is talking about debt/lending money etc.

I think as a Dickens fan, I should quote my fave reference he ever made to lending money -- it's from Nicholas Nickleby, about Ralph Nickleby... the villain, when he was a child gutenberg.org/files/967/967-…

I'm going to summarize:

Ralph as a child didn't bother with any complicated interest calculations when he lent money to fellow students -- he required to be paid on "pocket money day" and interest charged was based on amount lent, not number of days

(making fun of Stu taking a pic of our dinner before we eat it)

Whaddya think we're at? Per Se?

[and yeah, I totally took pics of the fanciest potato chip you ever saw...at Per Se] Check out this potato chip

FANCY

mmmm

Wordle 364 4/6

⬜🟩⬜⬜🟨
🟩🟩⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 blah
Daily Quordle 145
2️⃣5️⃣
8️⃣6️⃣

⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩 🟩🟨⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟨🟨⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜ 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ 🟩🟩⬜🟩⬜
⬜🟨🟩⬜⬜ 🟩🟨⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟨🟨🟨⬜ 🟩🟨⬜⬜🟩
⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

@KelleyKga In my recent post, here is a graph of recent top causes of death for teens (age 13-17 -- I don't include adults).

Yes, I have COVID in there for 2020 & 2021. You can see it for 2021 if you squint. About 2.5% of deaths for the group for that specific year. @KelleyKga This is my post on childhood mortality trends:
marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/childhood-mo…
Using the underlying cause of death -- of which there is one and only one per death certificate. I looked at age 1-17. (Avoiding infant mortality issues)

No, COVID was not a major cause of death.

yup

Wordle 363 4/6

⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
🟨⬜🟩🟨⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Daily Quordle 144
5️⃣8️⃣
7️⃣4️⃣

⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨 ⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨
⬜🟩🟩⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟩⬜🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩⬜⬜🟩
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟨🟨⬜
⬜⬜🟨🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟩⬜
🟩🟨🟨⬜🟨 ⬜⬜🟩⬜etc

Try two on the poll

Which age group in USA had highest death rate from motor vehicle accidents (not adjusted for miles driven/traveled) in 2019? Which age group in USA had highest death rate from motor vehicle accidents (not adjusted for miles driven/traveled) in 2020?

@chasrmartin yeah, someone shared this with me today, and I saw it on two other sites:
medicalxpress.com/news/2021-09-c…

holy shit, I've been writing about this since April 2020. This person has added nothing new. He's just redone the CDC excess mortality dashboard... and didn't add a damn thing. @chasrmartin Oh, and you're a computer guy. So you'd think... well, maybe he's added something, like making it easier to select the area in the drop down

First, he defaults to Texas (fine, he's at Rice)
But guess where "United States" shows up in the drop-down list?

Here is a graph of U.S. drug overdose death rates, 1999-2019 by ten-year age bands

(Observations will follow in thread) as the title indicates, the top death rates due to accidental drug overdoses are for those age 25-54.

In specific, age 35-44 was tops for 2019, which saw a steep rise in rates since 2015.

Drug overdose deaths rose by close to 30% in the United States in 2020
cnn.com/2021/07/14/hea…

I knew it was going to be bad.... but not THIS bad. This is awful.

I was going to write about heart disease, but yeah I think I'm going to be talking about drug overdoses first. (and if y'all have been tweeting this story at me... yeah, no kidding. HOLY SHIT THIS IS BAD)

June 2021 update of U.S. Population Mortality Observations Preview of 2020 Experience -- now out from @SOActuaries

soa.org/globalassets/a…

A few notes to follow Table 1 on page 11: 2020 U.S. Population mortality rates and change by age group. With & without COVID.

Look particularly at the "without COVID" column -- very large increases for age 15-44.

Before there was Taxing Tuesday on STUMP there was Soda Tax Stupidity!

Here is the first appearance of the Cook County soda tax on the blog: 25 July 2017
stump.marypat.org/article/785/il…

"Since this is Illinois, they couldn’t pass a simple soda tax without screwing it all up" the Cook County soda tax, alas, was dead by December 2017.

In the meantime, I had a lot of fun with this idiotic tax.

I often ran those posts on Fridays, just due to their sheer stupidity (and wanting a good laugh for the weekend)

Let's look back at the short-lived soda tax!

So popping out of earlier discussion thread

Chicago MEABF is one of the city pension funds. A 2017 stress test was done meabf.org/assets/media/5… Here are the results I see in that report: they tested multiple historical scenarios (2008 financial crisis, Black Monday, etc.) as well as some simple scenarios (flat market)... and projected to 2022. So it's just a five-year stress test. Why five years?