Sunday, April 26, 2020

Death is Seasonal

You are going to hear lots of politicians claim in coming months that declining deaths are due to the "success" of their various shutdown actions. What you probably won't hear is that there is an underlying seasonal trend to deaths. In other words, even if these shutdowns had zero effect, deaths would decline until fall. Once again the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc is ignored.

The figure is a bar chart showing that in 2017, an average of 7,708 deaths occurred each day. January, February, and December were the months with the highest average daily number of deaths (8,478, 8,351, and 8,344, respectively). June, July, and August were the months with the lowest average daily number of deaths (7,298, 7,157, and 7,158, respectively).