Denis Rancourt
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Denis G. Rancourt, Marine Baudin, Jérémie Mercier
Summary
We analyzed historic and recent all-cause mortality data for France, and other jurisdictions for comparison, using model fitting to quantify winter-burden deaths, and deaths from exceptional events. In this way, COVID-19 is put in historic perspective. We prove that the “COVID-peak” feature that is present in the all-cause mortality data of certain mid-latitude Northern hemisphere jurisdictions, including France, cannot be a natural epidemiological event occurring in the absence of a large non-pathogenic perturbation. We are certain that this “COVID-peak” is artificial because it:
We suggest that:
According to our calculations, this caused some 30.2 K deaths in France in March and April 2020. However, even including the “COVID-peak”, the 2019-2020 winter-burden all-cause mortality is not statistically larger than usual. Therefore SARS-CoV-2 is not an unusually virulent viral respiratory disease pathogen. By analyzing the all-cause mortality data from 1946 to 2020, we also identified a large and steady increase in all-cause mortality that began in approximately 2008, which is too large to be explained by population growth in the relevant age structure, and which may be related to the economic crash of 2008 and its long-term societal consequences.
