Obamot wrote:
- “death rate"
What I translate without frills as "Mortality rate" and it looks like this:
A rate is always in relation to something.
Here, and it is in the subtitle of the graph, it is about the cumulative number of deaths, compared to the number of "exits" dead + sick having recovered.
A straight line therefore means that this rate does not increase, in other words that the "average mortality" does not increase. So in short, that the virus in question is "still as deadly".
Mortality rates are not easy to manipulate: over a period of say 120 years, the death rate of a human population is 100% !!! We will all die eventually.
We therefore rather measure "lethality rates: out of 10 people who have caught a particular disease, how many die from it?"
Or, at the scale of a country, we measure "excess mortality": it is the curves above, where we highlight the difference in surface area between the "average curves" (because mortality is always a little variable) and the year curve. This deviation is presumed to be, "on average", the consequence of the virus. We got that for the heatwave too. Read well on the surface: each cm² represents x thousands of deaths ... So a very high but narrow peak (heat wave) will cost relatively little, compared to an "average but very long bump" (typically epidemics).
There, these are rough curves. Because who will be able to say that the dead are in direct connection with the Covid? For example, as a population ages, the death rate naturally increases - yes, the old die more!
Demographers therefore have tools which allow, on the basis of multiple data (epidemiological, weather, age of the population) to "calculate" what the curve of the year would have been - and the difference will therefore be the estimate. fairer possible deaths that can be attributed to the virus (or ditto by the heat wave). These will be data that we will have later ...