in case you've heard that covid deaths are inflated,
let's look at deaths from all natural causes...

We see much higher weekly deaths from natural causes since March of 2020. How many more people are dying than we would expect? For "excess deaths" we simply use 2019 as our baseline and subtract the deaths in 2019 from those in 2020.

How many of these excess deaths were officially attributed to covid?

Excess deaths match or exceed covid deaths except around March 2021 and March 2022. The two curves correlate fairly well.

Is covid overblown? Apparently even more excess deaths are occurring during the pandemic than are attributed to covid. I have not seen this comparison at any other website, but would love to hear if you have.

As a sanity check, let's sum all the individual natural causes of death and compare it with the total that we've been using:

So the causes of death included in the MMWR are just the major ones--they add up to about 75% of the total deaths from natural causes. However, the difference is fairly constant, so we can see most of the interesting variation in the individual causes of death in the next slide...