Yeah, and is it eve 120K? How many people died of heart attacks because the hospitals were shut down or the doctors were harder to access? I am the peak of the boomer generation and I turned 65 last year. The age/death figures seem to follow pretty much normal dying demographics. 7% is a large jump in heart attack deaths, but anyone who has ever examined the age/death data of heart deaths finds they too increase significantly with age. You have to die of something.

I have thought about those BLS statistics you posted a few weeks ago. Seems they did show a decline in the increase from the year prior. Seems I do recall births peaking around 2006, which would indicate an increase, not a decrease. I will go farther, in that I have looked at the figures too. One thing I found that was surprising is that the annual increase in deaths isn't linear, but erratic. I had expected to find a direct link between flu severity and the volatility of the figures. I found no such link, that was significant. There is something else, that in a given year, adds or subtracts from the death total. 2019 was actually a low death year, when adding in the trend. You would think, out of a sample size of over 300 million, you would have a more stable flow of statistics.

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The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.---John Kenneth Galbraith