Should We Talk About The Sigma Nine Plus Unicorns?
Should We Talk About The Sigma Nine Plus Unicorns?
A historic inflection point is taking place - and we're missing it.
Every year 60 million people, or about 0.8 percent of the world population, die. And about 140 million babies are born, leaving a positive tally of at least 80 million new lives. It’s just the way we roll.
Historically, the causes of death are standard fodder from year to year, with little deviation. In the US, 75 percent are lifestyle-related complications, aka chronic disease, led by coronary issues. Influenza (2%), suicide (2%), painkillers (4%), alcohol (1%), and firearms (1%) total approximately 10 percent. Accidents and miscellaneous cover the rest of 15 percent.
This standard breakdown persisted even through the peak of the 2020 pandemic, except that no one died from influenza for the first time in history (insert clown face icon here). Overall death rates went down a bit in most countries while we hunkered down and destroyed the economy for fear of excess death rates.
April 2021, everything changed. A statistical inflection point took place that will appear in the history books in the future. Someone will study these figures in 3010 and ask why the hell we didn't catch the signs. Why did we stay silent?
By the third quarter of 2021, a freaked-out CEO of a $100 billion insurance agency that had been tallying population dynamics since the 19th century mentioned a three-sigma event and then vanished from the public arena.
Sigma is a measure of standard deviation. A three sigma says that there is a 0.3% probability that the excess deaths result from random variations in population dynamics. Five sigma stands for a one-in-a-million chance. Six sigma stands for one in a half-billion fluke. And so on.
Anything above six sigma is a so-called unicorn event.
Nine sigma is a unicorns-on-acid-traveling-through-black-holes-and-dropping-winning-lottery-tickets-through-your-chimney type event.
Why is sigma important? Because today, in the third quarter of 2022, a year after the first inflection point, we are looking at nine plus sigma events, especially in cancer and lymphomas, based on official worldwide data.
Table Source
In the US alone, the non-C19 excess deaths are caressing WWII levels. The excess is 15-30% over the standard mean in individual countries.
How much is 20% of 60 million?
Are the recent surprise casualties in your social circle part of the new sigma trend?
How many youngsters and athletes who keeled over, got a stroke, discovered a metastasis, or just passed ahead of their universal schedule, got picked up by a unicorn?
The overall response to these questions has been total and absolute silence from everyone but a few intrepid investigative statisticians and scientists.
Silence so loud we might as well be sitting in the eye of a Category 5 hurricane, expecting the beast to rip our house apart any moment but somehow pretending it's not there. Maybe even making some herbal tea for our loved ones, but making sure we don't make any noise with the teacups, so we don't upset anyone.
Sometimes it's good to talk about things and make some noise.
If we see a unicorn, we should talk about it.
We could even throw the porcelain against the wall.
To stay silent is to collude.
I've been a bull in a china shop with my family but no one listened. They got more stubbornly poked. Maybe if I stay silent now there's a hope they will wake up. What else is there to do.
So if 72 million people die each year for the next few years, have we taken into account potential reproductive failure, or are we going to assume that we are still going to get 140 million new lives. I am pretty sure there is a negative reproduction factor at work as well, not that it wasn't anticipated by mid century anyway...