Yes, but they didn’t age instantaneously in 2021. I think cause-of-death numbers will be revealing, but we’ll have to wait a while for those.
It would be rather surprising if Taiwan did not experience a jump in mortality during 2021. The same effect occurred in several other countries. It was mostly in the younger (working-age) demographic, and nobody has been able to explain why. It definitely wasn’t COVID.
From the same spreadsheet,
From 2010-11 there was a jump of ~7k deaths, 2013-14 there was a jump of ~8k deaths, from 2015 to 2016 there was a jump of around 9k deaths.
Nothing to see here, please move along.
How do you know there isn’t? You can’t just point at some random period in history and declare that you’ve solved the mystery. There might have been some reason for that trend in 2010-2016 - for example, a similar effect in the US was partly due to prescription opioid deaths.
Raw deaths alone aren’t meaningful. We need further information to come to a conclusion - ASMR and causes-of-death - but on the face of it, a sequence of slowly descending ASMR numbers looks like it stands a chance of being broken.
I didn’t declare I solved any mystery, I just pointed out that jumps of 7-9k have occured 3 other times in the last 12 years leading to a jump of 10k last year to possibly not be as significant as one might think at first glance.
During that period, each of those differences was within 1 sigma of the average, apart from 2010 and 2016 (1.55 and 1.7 respectively). True, the last 5 years have been curiously stable, but nevertheless, a 8-sigma difference from the previous 5 year average merits a closer look. If you include the 2022 figure in the average, you still have a 2 sigma difference. Might just be noise. But given that some extraordinary things happened in 2020 with no remarkable reflection in CMR, we might wonder why 2021 is different.
Given that Jan-Apr this year we already have 63.7k deaths it is possible that this year is also shaping up for 180+k - perhaps the ‘new normal’? In which case the Q for me becomes why has the No. of deaths rise by 7-10k every 3-5 yrs and then approx stabilise at that new number until the next jump in 3-5 yrs time - is it related to elections or something like that?
Could be any number of explanations, and as you said there could be a benign one. But when you have possible underlying causes and an observed effect, one would expect the authorities to investigate. Or at least make some comment. Several other countries observed a jump in non-COVID mortality during 2021, and it was predominantly in working-age people. AFAIK no explanation has been advanced.
One thing I noticed on that chart was some unfeasibly low crude mortality numbers for the 1990s. Perhaps Taiwan was just a much younger country at the time.
In the 1950s the population of Taiwan was < 8 million, 1 million of those from the KMT retreat here probably many of those < 30 yrs. So around 2000s might be the start of people starting to die from age related concerns just as you suggested. I’m probably not making sense but I gussung a significant number of the population was all of a similar age from the retreat and I would think from 2000 onwards those started dropping due to old age.
Probably because people wanted to live through the Chinese New Year. There is a real psychological effect that leads people to die more frequently on certain days due to superstitious beliefs.
Maybe the deaths don’t get registered during CNY. They won’t do funerals at that time, right? So a lot get reported at one time.
Or maybe Grandma shouldn’t have asked the family so many annoying questions over CNY.
Too much day old 水煮豬肉
My initial thought was either that, or the overeating and traumatic family gatherings killed people after the Schall von Bell New Year.
Also learned of this report from Chris Martenson.
New Zealand is probably the closest analogue to Taiwan at this point. Chris Martenson brought up the report because it points to a temporal relations between vaccination and all cause mortality.
That same relation cannot be found in Taiwan’s data.
Try that again, plotting the difference between 2021 and the previous 5-year average for each month (giving you an estimate of monthly excess mortality). There’s a definite uptick in the latter half of 2021. I didn’t have the vaccination figures to hand, though, so couldn’t check for correlation. Where did you get those?
My personal feeling is that, if there are post-vaccine deaths, they won’t show up in all-cause mortality figures. Assuming VAERS numbers are in the right ballpark, it’s just too small a number to be visible with any certainty. OTOH, it’s hard to come up with a plausible alternative explanation for the NZ observations. I would double-check those figures, though; Guy Hatchard strikes me as a bit of a crank and he might have got something wrong there.
I started out by parsing through government released gosh darn pdfs, but gave up half way and realized ourworldindata.org has a full downloadable CSV that has the daily data for the entire world. I used filters to get Taiwan’s daily new vaccines, then used group by month in a pivot table to get the monthly data. Probably would have been easier if I just pandas dataframed it, but anyway.
If it’s not large enough to be visible, it’s probably not a really issue.
In many countries COVID deaths were barely visible in all-cause mortality. So it could be argued they were not really an issue either 
I would suggest vaccine deaths are important simply because of the politics that drove the vaccination campaign. If governments had simply said “here’s a vaccine, we’re not really sure if it’s any good or not, and frankly you take it at your own risk”, then it would be reasonable to dismiss vaccine deaths as just an unfortunate consequence of attempting a slipshod solution. The fact that they were mandated (in various ways) means that governments are culpable for even a single premature death.
The problem with statistical approaches to locating those vaccine deaths (as opposed to, say, robust post-vaccine surveillance) is that you are limited by the characteristics of the source data. All-cause mortality is inherently noisy. You can therefore only obtain a probable range of excess mortality, not an exact figure.
For countries like Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, so far that’s an pretty accurate description. The point is to keep it that way.
Now that you also have the vaccination data, I’d be glad either way to see if you can or cannot find a temporal causality in Taiwan or elsewhere.
There is no death data past 2020 though.
I get my all cause death data from the first link on this page
https://www1.stat.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=15409&CtNode=4693&mp=3
By clicking on that link, it would take you to this page, and you also have to click the first link
https://www.moi.gov.tw/cl.aspx?n=4412
Which will take you to a third page, whose URL changes every month. For now it’s this URL: https://ws.moi.gov.tw/001/Upload/400/relfile/0/4413/79c158fd-d51f-4061-b24b-fbcdb0fb92d9/month/month.html
The link that says 1.2-現住人口出生、死亡、結婚、離婚登記 (XLS) (ODF) will get you the death numbers.
