[ifinnegan]

Yes. Shows April had increased deaths.

Since then it’s barely above prediction. Who knows if it’s statistically significant. Or is that what the x’s are supposed to mean? It’s not described particularly well the methodology.

We’ve been out of epidemic conditions since June at least.

[2aProtectsTheRest]

No, it's every single week since March that we've had excess deaths. And the threshold for excess deaths is already statistically significant. From the CDC site on excess mortality: "Counts of deaths in the most recent weeks were compared with historical trends (from 2013 to present) to determine whether the number of deaths in recent weeks was significantly higher than expected, using Farrington surveillance algorithms (1). The ‘surveillance’ package in R (2) was used to implement the Farrington algorithms, which use overdispersed Poisson generalized linear models with spline terms to model trends in counts, accounting for seasonality. For each jurisdiction, a model is used to generate a set of expected counts, and an upper bound threshold based on a one-sided 95% prediction interval of these expected counts is used to determine whether a significant increase in deaths has occurred." - Source: CDC

It's ridiculous to pretend these numbers don't exist. They do. Arguing about them is a distraction from WHY these numbers are as bad as they are, which ties back to the terrible policy decisions implemented by governors; mostly governors who happen to be Democrats. I'm talking about policy decisions like forcing nursing homes to accept known-infected COVID-19 patients. Shuttering businesses which sparked a panic that led to masses of people crowding into Costco and Walmart at a time when maintaining calm and distance was needed most. Ridiculous guidelines for businesses, schools, and others not based on any science whatsoever which has continued to enable the rapid spread. Complete and utter failure to protect the elderly and the vulnerable by providing concrete and readily available assistance to caregivers.

The policy failures in state in local governments are why the numbers are so ridiculously high. We likely could have avoided half these deaths or more if the governors asked for Federal help in a timely manner and implemented policies that actually slowed the spread instead of accelerating it. Those are discussions worth having. This nonsense about nobody actually dying is demonstrably absurd and takes away from real discussions about WHY people have been dying.