What on earth are you looking at? The default view is US weekly excess deaths for 2018 through October 2021, and uses historical estimates from 2013 to present to estimate per-week thresholds: it's most certainly NOT using a single threshold per year. Go read the methodology section, please!
You can clearly see bumps due to flu season in previous years, but because flu season happens every year since before 2013, this becomes a regular seasonal effect and don't show up as 'excess' except in late 2018. We also happen to know that flu was greatly suppressed by anti-Covid measures these last two years.
You are correct, I looked at it again, it's actually using historical data.
But I'm still not sure what I'm looking at, overlaying a single year over an average is always going to look "excessive". I want to see previous years as well, why not just extend the graph? That's the one single most important number that you never get so see. Here they have buried it in a complex algorithm which looks honestly suspicious at first glance, upper bound for excessive death is basically the same as average. Is standard deviation really that low?
EDIT: I just want to see how many people died per capita in 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and so forth, why is that not shown anywhere?
> EDIT: I just want to see how many people died per capita in 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and so forth, why is that not shown anywhere?
Because that statistic makes the whole thing seem very mellow. Same thing as average life expectancy by year; the change from 2019 to 2020/21 is very slight.
Yeah but then the whole thing is very mellow, and showing that to people is the right thing to do, and not misinterpreting to blow something out of proportion to spread panic. But I guess it doesn't get enough clicks, and it's too late now to point out that the emperor is naked...
Based on your earlier misreading of the data, please notice that you have a conclusion that you're projecting into the data. As they say, you can torture the data until it speaks. But it's very easy to look up yearly flu deaths (~40k, up to 60k in the exceptional 2017-18 season), and see that there's an order of magnitude difference between that and what we see here.
In other words, Is the emperor actually naked, or are you simply fishing for the conclusion you want to hear?
You can clearly see bumps due to flu season in previous years, but because flu season happens every year since before 2013, this becomes a regular seasonal effect and don't show up as 'excess' except in late 2018. We also happen to know that flu was greatly suppressed by anti-Covid measures these last two years.