Cheers Hamwich ..... first let me nail my colours to the mast .... I have a Science background and am in no way shape or form a 'covid denier' or 'anti-vaxer' .... in fact the exact opposite 🙂
As I've said before on here, the patchy impact of Covid around the world in the face of seemingly contradictory health-care provisions have, since the start, made me consider that factors beyond individual national responses have had the greater part to play in death numbers (eventual widespread vaccine roll-out excluded).
It would appear that 2019 adjusted deaths were around 4% down from 2018, (which was a reasonably typical year) and a similar dip around 2013 was followed by a matching readjustment .... this relates to about 20,000 people.
One consequence of the general decline in death you rightly point out is a top heavy age structure compared to, say, African or South American countries ..... if covid had been a re-run of the Spanish Flu that attacked the younger population our figures would have been very different (but socially more disasterous)
I'm interested to see what the results are of the long term scientific analysis of this pandemic ( the short term political posturings, not so much 🙂) ... one thing's for sure, with modern global communications and massive data gathering we'll get far more understanding from this one than 100 years ago.
Thanks for your very thorough post.
K
