I don’t trust COVID death statistics. Although I have used them at various times in the past, I always recognized the weakness and inconsistency of this data due to varying and often incredibly liberal definition of a “COVID death”. Going forward, whenever possible, when talking about deaths I will look to use all-cause deaths in my analysis.
COVID lethality per virus dropped by 10x in MA, pre-vaccine. Compared to that, hypothetical vaccine benefit is just noise. https://github.com/s1rh3nry/covid_calc#readme
Do you think this would look different if you looked only at the older population that was most affected by COVID?
Thank you.
Even if you don't like COVID deaths as a variable, I recommend looking into non-COVID deaths.
These auto-regressions are also very informative:
https://years.pervaers.com/
Displayed is average weekly excess mortality for the 85+ group, but I'm not 100% sure, might be 65+.
What's remarkable is that excess mortality in 2021 predicts excess mortality in 2022 (Pearson 0.88 across states).