>For a while now, we’ve had a mysterious jump in excess mortality in Europe. At first, nobody really paid any attention to it, with the exception of a handful of “right-wing populist anti-science conspiracy theorists”. At this point however, experts whose job it is to study trends like this are beginning to notice it too.
>You can see for yourself the excess mortality for much of the EU here. Few people realize that in 2021 we have had as much excess mortality, as we did in 2020. The difference is that the age profile has shifted: Whereas most of the excess mortality was in elderly people in 2020, in 2021 it’s increasingly showing up among younger people. The excess mortality has a peculiar characteristic, in that it starts showing up later in younger age groups, with the exception of children, in whom no excess mortality is observed.
>For the 29 participating countries as a whole, we have 4000 excess deaths among people aged 15-44. These deaths are hard to explain, because young people normally don’t die from COVID-19. Just 0.9% of COVID-19 deaths in the Netherlands are people under the age of fifty. The curve of excess mortality in this age category also doesn’t fit COVID-19. This is a seasonal virus that disappear in the summer, but the excess deaths among young people mainly show up during the summer.
>The problem with all of this excess mortality is that it doesn’t seem to be getting better, it seems to be getting worse. It’s now getting so bad, that even my own comparatively small country of 17 million, the Netherlands, is beginning to see the signal in its statistics. The Dutch demographic agency, the CBS, has reported that September was a month with significant excess mortality.
>What we notice in the most recent week, is that the mortality is most strongly elevated among the younger age groups. Last week we had 300 more deaths than we’re supposed to have. Twenty of those are COVID-19 deaths, the rest are mysterious and unexplained.
