This is exactly the problem, you're using an absolute number without reference "look big number = scary" and you are simply comparing to an average, which doesn't say anything about whether or not this is an unusual or especially different situation.
"The temperature outside is 2 degrees higher than average". Ok what conclusions can you draw from that? Very little. Just because you make a big scary number without reference, doesn't allow you to jump to a conclusion out of fear, it's just manipulative misleading misinterpretation to make it look as scary as possible, to disable people's critical thinking and support a point that actually doesn't have any basis.
No, I'm providing what you asked for: A measurement of excess deaths.
That is, not just the number of people who died, but the number calculated to have died over and above the normal seasonal average.
If those excess death calculations are perfectly acceptable to calculate the effect of bad flu seasons and other mortality-affecting events, why are they suddenly not okay now?
Yeah like every other article they use a formula to calculate what is "excessive" which is not explained at all, and is used as the whole basis of the article. I took a peak in the github repo and I can't really read R well enough to make anything of it, but from a quick look and reading the article "take the number of people who die from any cause in a given region and period, and then compare it with a historical baseline from recent years" it could be a well defined prediction, or it could just be an average. It's unclear as the method section here is completely unknown, and I'm sceptical how you could ever calculate a fixed number prediction without obscuring the standard deviation.
Why not just show standard deviation, median, average, percentile. Show the standard deviation in the graph.
You know that's just an article providing an overview, right? It's not the official source of excess mortality statistics.
For that, each country maintains an official group that has access to death certificates and other records when preparing statistics. The figure I quoted, for instance, is from the South African Medical Research Council, who publish their methodology. There's also EuroMOMO and many others.
Did you really think that statisticians and scientists have just magically forgotten about how to do basic statistics, for decades, when preparing these reports?
Why should I put any weight to statistical results that are made with some unknown "formula" and is not presented in a standard way.
Instead of using the normal measures of mean, average, standard deviation and percentiles, we just used "formula" and voila, here is answer. Ok I'm going to continue to be sceptical of such results..
"The temperature outside is 2 degrees higher than average". Ok what conclusions can you draw from that? Very little. Just because you make a big scary number without reference, doesn't allow you to jump to a conclusion out of fear, it's just manipulative misleading misinterpretation to make it look as scary as possible, to disable people's critical thinking and support a point that actually doesn't have any basis.