What you’ve just done is the equivalent of charting hurricane deaths in Louisiana for five years leading up to Katrina.
Bulls#it analogy.
Compare it to other pandemics then. Pull out your graphs. Show them.
I’ll mention one fact: Hong Kong flu in 1968 killed 100K Americans in a full year.
Covid-19 has killed 60K Americans in 6 weeks.
No. What the author at the Financial Time has done is the equivalent of plotting all deaths in New Orleans per week for the past five years and then showing a spike in the present year coincident with Katrina hitting New Orleans. This is to put the lie to the hurricane-bros that hey, it's just another storm, and people die and these folks had co-morbidities and couldn't swim and couldn't lift heavy beams off their crushed bodies and were going to die anyway and its not the fault of the corrupt city fathers and the incompetent corps of engineers who couldn't build sound dikes.
Which all misses the point that coincident with Katrina there was a large spike in mortality the cause of which needs to be explained, which explanation you can't offer and excuse it by trying to say there is nothing to explain.