Understanding Covid by looking at Excess Deaths I've been writing a series of articles that explain common elements of Covid models and how various characteristics impact Covid outcomes. In spite of my best efforts, there continues to be confusion around the true cause of death. Is Covid really that bad? Isn't it 'just like the flu?' Were pre-existing conditions the reason the individual died? I believe people also struggle with the 'low' numbers and probabilities. You often

In my first article, we laid the ground work for examining the effect of existing medical conditions on COVID outcomes. The article was prompted by a series of tweets and social media that suggested only 9,000 people really died of COVID. The rest died of other conditions. We’re going to build a model that explains how pre-existing conditions impact COVID outcomes and use that to explain the concept of comorbidity. We have a data set from the CDC with a lot of information. To

There has been a post floating around social media indicating that the CDC quietly updated the COVID numbers and admitted that only 6% of all the recorded deaths are due to COVID. The post suggests that COVID deaths including comorbidities are not truly caused by COVID. The post also carries a conspiratorial tone, suggesting the CDC changed the data in secret. Even the President retweeted this post, and Twitter — correctly — removed it as false information. Eventually, Dr. An