Hey I know we're all supposed to be like "hmmm hmmm maybe COVID isn't as lethal as we thought"

but for recent weeks, deaths in western Europe were kind of super high.

In raw number terms, deaths in EuroMoMo reporting countries (the ones not in tan on that map) were.... pretty high. Like... 40% above baseline. That said, this early data still isn't the highest on record., or even recently.

But it's worth noting that week 13 data was revised upwards for every country by about.... 1.5 standard deviations. So it's likely these numbers are gonna get revised upwards. Death-reporting systems appear to be backlogged. Which is not the kind of sentence you want to tweet.

It's rare that you get to say something is off the charts and you mean it completely literally but in fact Italian mortality rates are indeed off the charts.

Also I hope we can all appreciate the effort that EuroMoMo makes to correct their public statistics for delayed reporting, and thus avoids creating the Extremely Stupid Graph that is weirdly popular on right-wing twitter.

I won't share the graph, but you know what it is, and it's Very Dumb.

Want a graph which is Not Dumb?

When I went looking for historic monthly deaths for America so I could get a sense of how big a deal COVID was, I also grabbed monthly births back to 1915. So, here's monthly births and deaths!

Check out that post-war baby boom!

Pretty wild, eh?

The spike begins in April 1946, and gets huge by July 1946. That places the spike in conceptions at June-Dec 1945.

V-E day came in May 1945, V-J in September. So that fits very tidily!

Operation Magic Carpet began bringing GIs home in June 1945, so, again, that's quite a neat fit.

The boys came home and BABIES BABIES BABIES BABIES.

Though it's notable that there was also like a pre-baby-boom-baby-boom in (checks notes)

Late 1942 and early 1943?

I guess we can call that the deployment baby boom?

Here's the same data as rolling 12-month totals. You can see that the only major "annual" mortality blips we can see are 1918, 1929, 1943, and 1958 flus.

And the 12 months ending Jan 2020 had the lowest net natural increase since 1937.

Anyways, if COVID leads to a death spike in April of 30k-40k or higher, then it's possible that the US could experience its first month of natural population decrease since 1918.