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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32962 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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"The monthly excess mortality indicator is expressed as the percentage rate of additional deaths in a month, compared to a baseline period. The baseline is given by average monthly deaths in the period 2016-2019."

This is a very crude methodology compared to the Euromomo approach.

Well you click on "methods" at the link above, but I'll link it for you:

https://www.euromomo.eu/how-it-works/methods/

If I'm reading that correctly, all baselines for Euromomo are from pre-2009 data

It says "The data after week 2009-34", so I'm not sure where you're getting that.

If you want to argue methodology with a bunch of epidemiology PhDs then go ahead, but they seem very legit to me. (the ECDC and WHO agree, for what that's worth)

I feel like that's just a description that hasn't been updated since they introduced their monitoring (in response to H1N1) -- do you really think that they are modelling their baseline based on twenty year old data?

That text seems to have been copy-pasted from their initial paper here: https://www.euromomo.eu/uploads/pdf/wp7_report.pdf

In 2009 it would have made sense to exclude data from the then-current infection event from their baseline -- I'm fairly sure that they would be using a rolling five year period as time moved forward.

Do you really think that this group who's sole purpose for the past 15 years is modelling european mortality rates is composed of a bunch of retards?

Re: Eurostat -- "The monthly excess mortality indicator is expressed as the percentage rate of additional deaths in a month, compared to a baseline period. The baseline is given by average monthly deaths in the period 2016-2019. -- they are just taking the total deaths between 2016 and eoy 2019 and dividing by 48, this is a terrible baseline for something which such a clear seasonal trend.

Edit:

A more recent paper from Euromomo (https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2021.26.8.2001646) indicates (in the "modelling" section) that they are using the five years preceeding their study period for a baseline.

But for country-to-country comparisons it can still be pretty useful.

Wat? Different countries will have different seasonality and background rates, it's a terrible way of comparing countries.

For the same timeframe (Nov 2022)

Ah -- I may see the problem. This is before the increase in excess mortality started, so yes, most European countries (other than Spain, Portugal, Italy, UK, Germany, and the Netherlands I guess) had pretty normal mortality rates. Have a look at December; that is what I am talking about.

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