I know, right? I mean, who is going to send their flock of pandemic ostriches to RFK Jr. without realizing that he is going to slaughter them and use their entrails in some kind of mystic ritual to summon Tsathoggua from the primordial chaos to wreck havoc upon the world? This guy just screams maniacal Cthulhu cult leader or dhampir who has navigated through the centuries changing identities and feasting on the flesh of innocent virgins to sustain his thirst.
Stranger
This might explain the dead bear thing. And the whale head incident. And maybe the alleged dog eating thing.
The roadkill bear was just because he was peckish, but hauling a whale head on his station wagon leaking cerebral fluid was definitely some kind of vampiric fetish. But I’m pretty sure that this is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. As the facts come out I think we’re going to discover that this guy is a moron’s version of Hannibal Lector.
Stranger
Moderating:
Hey, just a reminder that this is QZ, not the pit. Kennedy probably deserves a pit thread, but this isn’t it.
Speaking as a poster, i hope the Canadian authorities turn down that bizarre offer, and have the birds quickly and humanely slaughtered.
Excess Mortality for Australia was
2021 -3.1
2022 1.6
2023 11.7
2024 5.1
Note the negative for 2021
In spite of COVID-19, 2020 had the lowest all-cause mortality on record, then all-cause mortality in 2021 was up, but excess deaths were down. It has been suggested that 2021 was a rebound year: all-cause mortality was up and excess mortality down, because old people who had not died in 2020, because of quarantine protection, died in 2021 as expected, not in excess.
All-cause mortality in Aus is up from the 2020 low, it’s now comparable to the late 90’s. I expect to see it continue to rise, because of an aging population, but that’s just based on the scare stories in the popular press, I haven’t investigated.
Deaths per capita possibly went back to match the previous trend line in 2023:
That said, I was expecting a decrease after the pandemic, as the victims of Covid were largely those who were closer to death already - the elderly and people with chronic illnesses.
If we imagine, for example, that everyone over the age of 50 was killed, you’d expect the death rate per capita to drop significantly below the baseline for a few decades since you need to wait for all those people under 50 to get back up into their 70s, 80s, and 90s to die of old age and natural causes. Covid isn’t quite that extreme, but you’d expect a somewhat similar effect. We shouldn’t return to baseline, until we’ve seen a drop under the baseline, if the cause of the rise was a rise in death, in a non-uniform way, that targeted those who were already closer to death.
Since we don’t see a swing the other direction, we might assume that the tapering off of Covid still had a high enough death rate that it balanced the dip? Possible.
Alternately, something else about society has been left by the Pandemic - mental health issues, self-harming practices, etc. - that have boosted the death rate back to what we had in the 1970s. After all, the rising trend prior to the Pandemic does seem like it may have been leveling out at around 8.7 - similar to our numbers during the 1990s. It’s impossible to say with confidence that we should draw a straight trend line from 2009 to today, versus drawing a hill shape that’s starting to plateau in 2018/2019.
Generally, I’d say that “something” bad is probably still occurring. That could be obesity, a willingness to walk in front of cars, vitamin D insufficiency. Whether and how much that ties to the Pandmic and Covid, I couldn’t say.
You would probably want to plot the above with other charts like the obesity rate, deaths by inflammatory disease, death by misadventure, deaths by virus, deaths by Covid, etc.
ETA: Actually, the death rate per capita would also be affected by the birth rate so…that may be the complicating factor.
Mortality rate (%) in Aus is massively influenced by migration.