The Curious Case of Already All Dead Germany
Let's understand why Germany's all causes death *rate* was already so high before C19
In various posts I have pointed out that Germany had a surprisingly high death rate all the way back before the pandemic. For instance, why weren’t people terrified to move to Germany in 2019 when Germany has one of the highest all causes death rates of any western country — even exceeding what most western countries are now experiencing with C19 included? Well, obviously there was no need for a population terrorizing narrative back then so voila: no problem!
So what is really going on?
One cynical theory might be that the former East German portion of the population is still suffering the after effects of communist rule and dropping like flies?
Well, first we can look at death rates among the various age groups and compare to somewhere like Sweden that we have already done some overall death rate comparison with Germany like this from “9% Uncorrected”:
So breaking this down by first looking at the deadliest age group from a rate perspective (that also results in high deaths numbers due to a high rate even if applied to a generally smaller population segment of the oldest people) we can look at we see this for age 85 and older when comparing Sweden to Germany in 2020:
Hmm. Note that I am still using mortality.org charts here without zero scaling them so the fact these are as close as they are (modulo C19 seasonality/ timing bumps) suggests divergences in death rates by age groups may not be the root of such a significant difference.
So then that suggests that there is just a different distribution of population by age groups that is driving it. Let’s take a look at an “overlay” of the 2019 population pyramid for Germany on top of a monotone version of Sweden’s pyramid:
Sure enough. The light blue/red “fringes” of this overlay of a colored Germany population pyramid on top of a monotone Sweden pyramid tells the story: There are a lot of red/blue German “fringes” at the top of the pyramid in the older age groups with most of the monotone Swedish larger populations being in the lower age groups!
Germany simply has a proportionately higher number of older citizens that the (roughly) same death rates by age groups apply to netting out to cause an overall higher death rate for the German population as a whole.
A simple two age band example using made up “roundish” numbers for generic countries of the same populations of 1 million is below for an easy “eyeball” math comparison to illustrate what this looks like:
Notice that the death rates for each of the two age bands are held to be the same for each country but the proportion of population in the oldest age band is higher in “Country B” which causes the math to result in a higher overall aggregate death rate for its population.
Mystery solved.
So it makes sense that there was no panic about potential (e.g. job change) moves to Germany in 2019 since the death rates for the young and working aged (as would normally be the case for such a move) are so much lower than for the oldest and the rates by age bands (without taking the time to completely compare them) are likely quite similar.
Though the media does their best to cover it up as with the current hysteria about hospitalized young people, it turns out that for both general death risk from all causes and for C19 death risk by itself the rates rise exponentially with age (augmented by comorbidities in both cases) hence the average, median and mode ages of death from C19 typically being the same or higher than normal deaths!
For some interesting perspective on this risk by age gradation see my post “Mode 86” that contains interesting charts like the one below. By the way, did you know that even with C19 included, it isn’t until age 54 that the average US adult reaches the threshold of a 1 in 100 per year (1%) risk of death from all causes? You might want to go check it out as a tonic for the latest hysteria.
Or like me just leave the TV off — I highly recommend it…