My own country alone has seen nearly 300 000 excess deaths compared to the annual average, with the waves of excess deaths neatly tracking those of known COVID infection waves.
This is exactly the problem, you're using an absolute number without reference "look big number = scary" and you are simply comparing to an average, which doesn't say anything about whether or not this is an unusual or especially different situation.
"The temperature outside is 2 degrees higher than average". Ok what conclusions can you draw from that? Very little. Just because you make a big scary number without reference, doesn't allow you to jump to a conclusion out of fear, it's just manipulative misleading misinterpretation to make it look as scary as possible, to disable people's critical thinking and support a point that actually doesn't have any basis.
No, I'm providing what you asked for: A measurement of excess deaths.
That is, not just the number of people who died, but the number calculated to have died over and above the normal seasonal average.
If those excess death calculations are perfectly acceptable to calculate the effect of bad flu seasons and other mortality-affecting events, why are they suddenly not okay now?
Yeah like every other article they use a formula to calculate what is "excessive" which is not explained at all, and is used as the whole basis of the article. I took a peak in the github repo and I can't really read R well enough to make anything of it, but from a quick look and reading the article "take the number of people who die from any cause in a given region and period, and then compare it with a historical baseline from recent years" it could be a well defined prediction, or it could just be an average. It's unclear as the method section here is completely unknown, and I'm sceptical how you could ever calculate a fixed number prediction without obscuring the standard deviation.
Why not just show standard deviation, median, average, percentile. Show the standard deviation in the graph.
You know that's just an article providing an overview, right? It's not the official source of excess mortality statistics.
For that, each country maintains an official group that has access to death certificates and other records when preparing statistics. The figure I quoted, for instance, is from the South African Medical Research Council, who publish their methodology. There's also EuroMOMO and many others.
Did you really think that statisticians and scientists have just magically forgotten about how to do basic statistics, for decades, when preparing these reports?
Why should I put any weight to statistical results that are made with some unknown "formula" and is not presented in a standard way.
Instead of using the normal measures of mean, average, standard deviation and percentiles, we just used "formula" and voila, here is answer. Ok I'm going to continue to be sceptical of such results..
Excess death tracking is hardly a new thing, most countries have been doing it for decades to measure the effect of things like flu outbreaks. Therefore when those same statistics being done using the same approach suddenly show huge climbs in 2020 and 2021 it means something.
Stop trying to minimise the pandemic. If your arguments about how to deal with it are rational they should stand up to the reality of how serious it really is, rather than a pretend reality where people haven't been dying in large numbers and filling up hospitals for two years.
I'm not trying to minimise the pandemic, I'm pointing out obvious ways that it is exaggerated, such as lacking basic statistical scrutiny and throwing around huge scary numbers with no comparison or explanation.
Another example from the media (now I am shifting goal posts, but defending my point of proving that it's exaggerated and manipulative): Why are they reporting running totals of number of deahts? And making big headlines of when they reach "new grim milestones"? How is that not a completely irrelevant manipulative misinterpretation? A running total of deaths, really? When will that ever go down? And using that to support a case that "things are getting worse" somehow.
Nope. You may think you are, but in reality you're ignorant of how these statistics are calculated and you that's why you think you're smart for finding what you think are mistakes. This has, actually, all been taken into account, and more, for excess mortality statistics.
I'd recommend you spend some more time learning how the scientists and statisticians calculating these figures actually work, and maybe speak to a few, before commenting further.
It's not my job to find out how they made their secret calculations, it's up to them to show it if they want to present credible results, otherwise it should be ignored.
My own country alone has seen nearly 300 000 excess deaths compared to the annual average, with the waves of excess deaths neatly tracking those of known COVID infection waves.