Expensive energy may have killed more Europeans than Covid-19 last winter
This analysis is incredibly flawed. It's face-palm levels of statistical incompetence here.> High energy prices can cost lives. They discourage people from heating their homes properly, and living in cold conditions raises the risk of cardiac and respiratory problems.Cardiac and respiratory problems you say! Hmmm, I wonder if there's a virus circulating that turns lungs into swiss cheese....or if it causes massive cardiac stress and damage too.The author's presumption about how energy prices can lead to excess deaths hinges upon a mechanism that COVID-19 also affects. It's not correlation: it's causation. COVID-19 causes respiratory and cardiac problems. They did not even attempt to address this fact!So then, they say "well some of these death's weren't caused by COVID-19." Ok sure. But how many of those folks who died from "the cold" actually died of hypothermia? Out of the ones that died from cardiac or repository distress, how many had prior COVID-19 infections? Were they recovered? If they recovered, was it full or did they have lingering, permanent long-COVID symptoms? Because we know there's a causal relationship, it really isn't hard to make the next step of inference to understand that this disease will be a very strong cofounding variable in those non-COVID-19 attributed excess deaths.tl;dr This article is BS because it ignores the causal relationship that COVID-19 has on mechanism by which higher energy prices could plausibly lead to increased mortality.