{"id":4681,"date":"2023-09-19T20:19:53","date_gmt":"2023-09-20T01:19:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=4681"},"modified":"2023-09-19T20:51:43","modified_gmt":"2023-09-20T01:51:43","slug":"the-pandemic-was-a-time-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/09\/19\/the-pandemic-was-a-time-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pandemic Was a Time Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/09\/13\/opinion\/covid-19-pandemic-deaths.html?searchResultPosition=10\">NYT<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Recently I came across perhaps the most mind-bending chart about the pandemic I\u2019d seen over three-plus years. Originally&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bmj.com\/content\/373\/bmj.n896\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a>&nbsp;two years ago in The British Medical Journal, it shows how Covid affected age-standardized mortality in England and Wales \u2014 a statistic that controls for demographic change in measuring death rates, so that a country doesn\u2019t look as if it\u2019s getting sicker just because it\u2019s getting older.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Two things about the chart jumped out. First, at the onset of the pandemic in 2020, there was a dramatic spike in age-standardized mortality. For men, the increase was 14.6 percent, according to the Office for National Statistics; for women, 11.9 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Second, though: In historical context, that jump did not appear all that large. It only brought age-standardized mortality to the level it had been in the year 2008, meaning that, correcting for age, the English and the Welsh were no more likely to die in 2020, in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime global health crisis, than they were 12 years before, in what did not seem like a particularly deadly year at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Novelty matters, and the sudden arrival of a masterfully infectious and deadly virus was justifiably alarming and galvanizing, adding a large amount of death on top of a mortality baseline we\u2019d all wish was much lower. But progress in improving that baseline matters, too. And from that vantage, the mortality setbacks of 2020 looked smaller than the apparent gains of the previous 20 years \u2014 and not just in England and Wales. Across much of Western Europe and North America, even the horrible pandemic peaks only brought age-standardized death rates as high as they were in normal-seeming years around the turn of the millennium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/09\/13\/opinion\/covid-19-pandemic-deaths.html?searchResultPosition=10\">continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<div style=\"display: none;\"><a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"\/secure-location.php\" title=\"EL k o RT u oQ\">EL k o RT u oQ<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NYT Recently I came across perhaps the most mind-bending chart about the pandemic I\u2019d seen over three-plus years. Originally&nbsp;published&nbsp;two years ago in The British Medical Journal, it shows how Covid affected age-standardized mortality in England and Wales \u2014 a statistic that controls for demographic change in measuring death rates, so that a country doesn\u2019t look [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":4682,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psychological-and-sociological-impact"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Screenshot-2023-09-19-at-20.32.44.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4681"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4683,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4681\/revisions\/4683"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}