All your hand waving and philosophizing cannot explain away the radically different behavior of deaths this year compared to previous years.
Pollution, smoking, cancer, all were present in years past and took lives in years past. Random noise does not look like this.
I’m not sure what that graph is saying because it uses the phrase “per week or month”, but the pop-up numbers on the graph seem to be 'per week'?
-->https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
So it looks like at the peak of 2020 in the week of April 12th, there were roughly 80,000 excess deaths compared to same period in 2017, which had roughly 55,000. (I'm, just rounding off numbers, it won't make any difference to ratios I am going over)
That would amount to a difference between those two years - at the peak - of roughly one excess death per 150,000 population, per day. Or is it saying a difference of 7 per day? (per 150,000 people)
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A difference of one death per 150,000 per day is not the end of the world. Nor even 7 deaths per 100,000 per day, which is more than what happened every day in America...for a whole month...in Spring 2020, in terms of difference in excess death between different years, and for about a month recently. And the excess deaths are not just covid-19, as has been seen.
The longterm harms of lockdowns will go on for years. Not to mention progress to a cleaner environment has been set back massively.
If we cannot extrapolate the effects of pollution, rising obesity, poor health habits, rising elderly population (also many with bad health habits), millions more people of all ages on some kind of life-support care every year, and the other effects I mentioned - rising a lot every year - could lead to rises of 1 excess death per 2 or 500,000 people a year, year after year, then I think we will have to wait for in-depth scientific analuyis later in the year, which I am 100% sure will describe something along the lines of what I have said.
The graph shows weekly raw death counts from all causes, enabling the viewer to assess excess deaths by comparing to the death counts of previous years.
Indeed, at the two peaks death rate was ~80k vs. ~55k in all previous years shown. An increase of about 25k weekly deaths, almost 50%. this just doesn't happen randomly or as a result of a long term rise in obesity or smoking or whatever. Something came along and finished off these people, whether they were primed for it or not. Otherwise statistics show that only 55k would have died, and 25k lived on another week despite their healthy or unhealthy lifestyle.
Of course, there are ways to minimize this number. If you calculate deaths per microsecond per billion people, it will be even lower than your number of 1 in 150000 per day. BTW, I believe it is actually 1.6 per 150000 per day (assuming 330M total US population) but whatever.
If half a million dead persons in the US - that would not have died this year statistically if Covid wasn't around - seems like a small number to you, we shall have to disagree.
Note that the better calculation is to sum deaths over the whole year, rather than focus on single weeks (a more accurate method to examine whether the virus is responsible would be to sum March 20-Feb 21 and compare to previous similar periods). But just eyeballing the graph on a weekly basis can easily show the uniqueness of this year.
You should note that there is very little variation between the years. For the peak April week the range of 2015-2019 varies by less than 3k, while 2020 was 24.5k above the average. I can't calculate how many SDs above the norm the 2020 result is, but it's surely not random chance that brought the result.
You should also note that assignment of causes can be trickier, which is why the CDC might revise flu deaths by 25%. But death from all causes circumvents this issue completely, and it does not vary by 25% or is revised by 25%.
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