So seems the latest wave of stupid on the internet is to claim that the deaths in 2020 were no more than in 2018, 2019 or other past years, which apparently means the coronavirus is a hoax or some such nonsense.
Nevermind the fact that there isn't an iota of truth anywhere in that nonsense. The number of deaths in 2020 is significantly higher than past years. In fact even though we only have data up to the beginning of december and 2 weeks of that is incomplete/delayed.. therefore we have about 6 weeks of data yet to be finalized. Despite that we are hundreds of thousands more deaths ahead of 2019 and 2018, by about 300,000 more so far. Hell the death rate is increased even if you **dont count** COVID by more than 1.2%...
Here is a crazy idea, instead of getting your knowledge base from random internet memes how about trying some research from time to time maybe? It isnt like its hard to find the real numbers.
@Atlas There are many sources, all of which agree with the stated facts here.
Since 2020 isnt complete yet you would likely need to get historic data seperate from current year data.
Here is one source for historic data up to 2019:
https://population.un.org/wpp/
For 2020 you will need dataset from a provisional source since 2020 isnt complete. Here is a source of that data for 2020
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Counts-of-Deaths-by-State-and-Select-Causes/muzy-jte6
I personally use more rigorously compiled data that a different set of scientists compiled from 15 reliable sources and aggregated and scrubbed. The links I provided were just to help find a public data source that shows similar trends. If you are saying its a 5 year rolling average I may have missed that.
Others from the thread have contributed other data sources and visualizations as well that also support the assertions I made, here is an alternative one for you that also shows a significant spike in 2020:
@freemo @Atlas
That's a nice dataset. Thanks.