co-authored with Jens von Bergmann & cross-posted over at MountainMath
Unfortunately, more and more people are dying due to COVID-19. We won’t know the full toll from COVID-19 for quite some time. But we can at least start to get a sense of its impact. One useful way of assessing the impact, of course, is just to plot deaths attributed to COVID-19. This highlights the real loss of human lives associated with outbreaks. But as any demographer can tell you, deaths are a normal part of life. Within a given population, we can reliably expect a certain number of deaths to occur over any given time period. So another way of visualizing COVID-19 deaths is also useful: How many deaths attribute to COVID-19 are occurring as compared to the deaths we would normally expect to occur? Continue reading →