Excess mortality – actual mortality. Grifting your way in life. Sunday outing with three kids.

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Many new statistical concepts have emerged with Covid.  One of them is excess mortality – how many more people die, as a percentage or raw number, than expected, in a given period.

Liars-with-statistics choose the option that tells the best story.  If 1000 people die in January of the average year, but last year it was 1001 and this year it is 1002, excess mortality has doubled.  Holy cow!

Excess mortality as reported by Ed Dowd in “Cause Unknown” is big news.  The number of prime-age working people kicking the bucket has risen dramatically.  Same for England, per the below, from Government statistics, as the jabs were rolled out.

As you see in this chart below of numbers from 2019, the number of people who usually die in their 30s and 40s is not insignificant. NB: I get this from Social Security and Inland Revenue actuarial tables.

For the number to almost double, which Dowd shows in the book, is big news.

The same graph shows that the number of ten-year-olds who die is historically very small.  About 20 per year per 100,000.  COVID-19 deaths constituted 2% of all causes of death in this age group," the researchers reported. That’s about one child in 300,000.  Even if you believe the diagnosis of Covid as the cause of death, not much.

Using the numbers in another graph (this from the US), below, it appears that only six of those twenty children die of disease.  Most are carried away by injuries, some self-inflicted, others not.

When the Daily Expose prints an article with a graph showing the incidence of Covid and vaccine deaths among children surging, they do not put it into context.  They seem to leave out the deaths due to trauma, focusing only on those due to Covid and other diseases. 

To their credit, they do include this paragraph: “This is supported by evidence from the UK’s Office for National Statistics, a government agency, which published a report on July 6th, 2022 confirming the dangers of the Covid-19 vaccines.  The report is titled ‘Deaths by Vaccination Status, England, 1 January 2021 to 31 May 2022‘, and it can be accessed on the ONS site here, and downloaded here.”  However, when you pore through the Excel spreadsheet at the link, the numbers do not appear nearly so ominous. 

Another thing they do right is to use prospective analysis with person-years as a metric.  Whereas a retrospective study would find the people after the fact and try to figure out what happened, these statistics identified the people to be tracked in advance and asked what happened afterwards.  The Office of National Statistics uses the right way to do it.  The figure is “person years” instead of “people” because some people cannot be located at the end of the year to find out what happened.

I’m not going to get my kids vaccinated.  I do wish it were easier to make apples-to-apples comparisons to make the decision.  It does not appear to me that either side wants it.

I follow Eugyppius regularly.  He is wrong on Ukraine but right on Covid. And here, right again about the sorry state of fundamental research.  I started a video on the theme of how research has been bastardized by the woke process.  He, as a journal editor, sees it more clearly than I in this wonderful piece.  I would usually be the one to attribute the decline to evolutionary forces.  Here it is he.  I would be more included to blame the woke culture in the universities.

Glenn Greenwald recently wrote that erroneous reporting is not a career impediment in journalism.  On the contrary, it seems to enhance a career, and even be a job requirement. The same is true for the poohbahs in high public office.  Here is a compendium of quotes from Peter Hotez, front-runner to replace Fauci.  If the ability to lie is a prerequisite, this guy is a shoo-in.

On the subject, I have read that Pfizer has managed to get the Project Veritas videos of Jordon Trishton Walker petty well scrubbed from the Internet.  Nice to find that one link remains alive as Big Pharma, Big Tech and the deep state continue to convince us that our fears of them are so well justified.

Yesterday Oksana had a music seminar all day, leaving me with the three kids. The temperature was in the mid-20s and there was about 2 inches of new snow. Our most frequent Sunday outing is to the farmers’ market, but that would’ve meant carrying 30 lb Marianna as well as groceries most of the way on my shoulders. The one mile route is shown in green on the map below.

Most of the things on the shopping list would be available from any store, but garbanzo beans, nuts and dried fruit not so. We get them from this weekly farmers market on Perova or the permanent market at the end of the red line Metro at Lisova.  Lisova is considerably farther. In good weather it makes a nice bicycle outing. But one can also get there by public transit – the bus line shown in black on the map and the Metro line shown in red. I opted for going by public transit.

There are more kids riding the bus and Metro on weekends than weekdays, but still not many. There was one little girl on the bus and a couple of other little girls and their mothers sharing our Metro car. You almost never see a family of three kids on public transportation. It is even more rare to see them with their father. It arouses some curiosity when the man in question is an older fellow speaking English while the kids speak Ukrainian among themselves.

People frequently ask Eddie about his grandfather. It pleases me that he is quick to tell them that I am his father. In the United States it is not uncommon for kids to be embarrassed about having older parents.

I am sure that most families of five here get around by car as they would in the United States. The scarcity of kids is attributable in part to selection bias – people with kids don’t ride public transit. But it is likewise a genuine lack of kids.  Ukraine’s multi-decade birth dearth is now exacerbated by Covid and the fact that there are many families among the four million refugees in Western Europe and other millions in Western Ukraine.

Though the reactions to the children are mixed, a majority don’t show a great familiarity with kids in general. People love to give them candy. It bothers Oksana when she hears about it. Some will try to strike up a conversation with the kids. Old ladies are particularly inclined to admonish them not to do anything dangerous. They get nervous about kids getting within 5 feet of the edge of the platform. The fact that they are anxious about kids standing up on the Metro works in our favor. No matter how crowded, somebody almost always gives up their seat for an old man and young kids.

Any two-year-old is a handful. They are starting to talk and to have opinions of their own, but they are too young to appreciate the need to follow instructions. Marianna was difficult on the eighth of a mile walk from our house to the bus. She wanted to walk every direction except where we were going. She stopped and needed to be coaxed into coming along. She chased the birds. She wanted to be picked up and put on my shoulders. Knowing I would be doing it later, I told her to wait.

Steering a two-year-old is not an easy job. Sometimes you can get them to go where you want by coaxing them. Sometimes you can do it by steering them, putting your hand on their shoulder so that they cannot easily go astray. Sometimes you have to forcibly grab their hand or arm to persuade them. At times that doesn’t work and you have to drag them until they become convinced that they have no choice. Sometimes they go into tantrum mode, crying as you pull them. And, as a last resort, you sometimes have to pick them up. When I am being nice about it I put her on my shoulders, which she likes. When it is not that far, or I’m not feeling like rewarding bad behavior, I carry her under my arm like a squealing pig.

Men are better disciplinarians if only because we have the physical strength to compel children. A mother cannot do much more than coax and wheedle, a fact of which children will take full advantage. The whole game seems to be getting adult attention, and a recalcitrant two-year-old can occupy mom’s full attention for many minutes until she is totally exasperated. This is doubly true grandmothers.

I hear Grandma Nadia pleading with Marianna all the time to eat her breakfast, get dressed, lie down and get her diaper on, go to bed, get in the bath and so on. With me it’s a different story. I tell her what I want and give her an opportunity to do it, after which I simply pick her up and make it happen. This has its beneficial effects. When I make it clear that I am going to make something happen, Marianna runs to mom or grandmother and lets them do whatever it is that needs to be done rather than submit to daddy. I am pleased to note that whenever neither of the women is around they are happy enough to let me handle it. A two-year-old is very people-conscious.

Eddie had trouble pulling on his snow pants for this outing. Fortunately there is a used clothing store as well at Lisova, at the end of the long corridor leading from the Metro. We bought the food items from the dried fruit merchants along the way – these Muslims from the Stans are familiar with the old American and his entourage – and went to the used clothing store which appears to be run by Arabs.  Once again, they are quite gracious. All of them recognize me, and a couple greet me by name.

There was a table of plush toys next to the children snow pants. I got a lot of practice saying no as Eddie was picking out something that fit. I am pleased that the boy knows how to shop. He didn’t ask to buy pants until the old ones were too tight to put on. He made the decision fairly quickly.  He also needed a knit cap.  A two dollar decision he was able to make in two minutes. 

With only vegetables left to buy, we had a lot of time. The older children leapt at the chance to have a cocoa. Marianna dawdled all the way. She kept going everyplace except where we went, and fussed more and more loudly as I steered and pulled her. Things changed once she saw that hot chocolate was in the offing. She quite happily sat on my lap and drank most of mine through a straw.

Eddie wanted to buy his grandmother a pineapple as a present for her 74^th birthday, celebrated last Saturday. On the way, however, we past the lady who sells frozen foods. He immediately concluded that frozen pineapple would be better than fresh, so we bought pineapple chunks, strawberries and frozen corn.

Frozen foods are not nearly as common in Ukraine as in the United States. You have to know where to shop to get commodities such as frozen peas and frozen corn. I have yet to see, in my 15 years here, frozen concentrated orange juice.

We completed our shopping – mandarin oranges and pears – and went to the Metro. Marianna acted recalcitrant as usual. Eddie pleaded that I not use strong arm tactics to coerce her through the swinging doors and the turnstile. I was happy to leave it to him. I paid and went through. However, Marianna sat down and cried and Eddie could not persuade her to get up and come through. The ladies watching the turnstile told me it would not be possible to go back and get her. Somehow Eddie got her to her feet and we were reunited. I put her under my arm – squealing pig style – and carried her up the escalator and through the swinging doors before putting her down.

The trains are five cars long, and the one we needed was at the end. I had my hands full keeping Marianna pointed the right direction and away from the train. Eddie told me to get on the train quickly. I had not heard the “doors closing” announcement and figured we could get one car closer to the end. Mistake! Eddie got on the train and the door closed while the two girls and I were still on the platform. We waved goodbye and continued walking to the far end of the platform to wait for the next train.

I wasn’t worried – Eddie is familiar with the Metro. I figured we would meet him when we got off at Livoberezhna.  However, to my great surprise, when the train we would need arrived from the other direction, Eddie got off it. He knows how these things work, and had simply walked across the platform at the next station down.

That was the last of the excitement. Our bus arrived just as we got to the stop. We had a warm, comfortable ten-minute wait before he took off and we got home.

As you can gather, this was not a particularly relaxing three hours for me. It was, however, exciting for the children, the kind of experience from which they learn a lot. Marianna is getting experience with the world and learning what she can and what she can’t get away with. Eddie and Zoriana get to play the role of grown-up, helping me with Marianna and observing how it is done.

Eddie, Oksana and I had a talk after we got home about how people learn the business of parenting. Oksana repeated her mother’s observation that you are never ready, it just happens. Somehow you muddle through. The advantage in her mother’s generation – that’s my generation – was that we had experienced people around us. Grandmothers, aunts, and neighbors all had children. They knew what to do. A young mother was not totally on her own, as they are today. I am pleased that my children are getting their own education in how you raise kids. Maybe they will not be too reluctant to venture to have their own.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where Eddie and I had a wonderful conversation about the spread of agriculture, languages and people through pre-modern Europe.  Tangents included mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA.  Zoriana is off to kindergarten, and Marianna is sleeping next to me.

Graham