Taiwan's Department of Household Registration provides monthly statistics going back to January 2013, including the total number of births and deaths per month. I consider these raw numbers to be reasonably reliable
Since January 2021, there have been more deaths than births every single month -- for 19 months and counting. -- and the gap is rapidly widening. Does this have anything to do with the birdemic or the peck? Let's zoom in on the 2020-2022 period.
Taiwan started pecking in March 2021, and half the population was pecked by September. The birdemic itself didn't start in earnest until May 2022, with only a negligible number of "cases" and birdemic-attributed deaths before that; by the time the birdemic started, about 85% of the population was already pecked.
Insofar as there has been a recent drop in births, over and above the gradual downward trend that has been going on for at least a decade, it appears to have started in January 2021, before either pecks or birdemic. As discussed in my earlier post, "Reports of the 'depopulation of Taiwan' may have been somewhat exaggerated," Igor Chudov has made much of the fact that the June 2022 birthrate was 23% lower than the June 2021 birthrate, calling this an astronomically unlikely "26-sigma event," but as you can see, fluctuation of that magnitude is actually quite normal. (Chudov's "26-sigma" label came from the insane assumption that the standard deviation for births-per-month would be proportional to that of births-per-year.)
June 2022 is nine months after half the population had been pecked, which I think is too early to see any peck-induced decline in fertility. Older people were pecked first, so I assume the number of women of childbearing age who had been pecked by September 2021 must have been much lower than 50% -- how much lower I can't be sure. If the pecks have drastically impacted fertility, as suggested by anecdotal evidence, that likely won't be statistically obvious until around the end of the year. The period between now and February is especially important, because after February (9 months after the start of the birdemic in Taiwan) it will (in theory anyway!) be hard to disentangle the effects of the peck from those of the birdemic itself.
As for the recent uptick in deaths, that golden window of unambiguity has already passed, and the data is inconclusive. Any post-peck-pre-birdemic increase in mortality is too slight to separate from the overall background trend of gradually increasing death rates (presumably due to the fact that the population is aging). The relatively high death rate since May 2022 (if it is in fact the beginning of a trend, not just random noise) could in theory be due to the birdemic, the pecks, or any combination of the two.
I'll probably follow these numbers for the rest of the year just out of idle curiosity -- but that's really all it is. Can we really expect any new data to change anyone's mind about the birdemic or the pecks this late in the game?
3 comments:
@Wm - I feel it is probably a mistake to go too deeply into this data - beyond looking at the crude rates and broad (before and after) timing.
e.g. It is not known whether the birdemic is from one or (probably) many infectious agents, and what happened in T. may have been a different pathogen/s from other places; and the 'test' is not valid being neither specific nor having a defined sensitivity.
(Also the supposed birdemic agent itself is dubious, being derived from slapdash sampling and a good deal of 'modelling'.)
Also (and because of that) the timing of pathological events (how quickly different types of harm might arise) for a *new kind* of injected agent are not known.
But the data you present are interesting, nonetheless - or would be if researchers were interested in learning the truth about the world.
The correct way to sort it out would not be more official stats, but closer clinical investigation of individuals - which almost never happens in medicine, nowadays.
In the past, I worked closely with a major research hospital in my city and proofread dozens of papers for submission to medical journals. They were ALL statistical analyses (done in a formulaic way by doctors with a very shallow understanding of statistics), and statistical correlations were presented as conclusions, rather than as observations from which to hypothesize — as the end point of the scientific process rather than the beginning! What they say about laws and sausages is apparently doubly true of “science” as it is practiced today. Not that you need me to tell YOU that, of course!
From Dr. Charlton and others, and the general knowledge that much of Science, statistic, etc. are now fraudulent - I've been trying to trust my personal network effect.
One thing I'm eyeing, and which may be a concerning trend and rumored, is that I don't know anyone fully pecked who has conceived and come to full term since the program begin. There were two births in our friends network (un-pecked), and more in the broader Church network who were un-pecked.
I know closely three sets of very young Christian recently-marrieds (fully pecked) who really should have been pregnant by now children, but aren't.
I also know among fully pecked close friends heart disease, a couple cases of cancer, and a case of bad blood clots resulting in hospitalization. Most of these seem like common enough disease though. We also had a family member see a local heart specialist, and his first question was "were you recently pecked?"
My impression is that it's already one of those things everyone sort of knows but mostly doesn't talk about, like crime statistics.
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