At the end of 2021 I was doing an obituary scraping project with this website. My data storage was very limited, so I focused just on Texas.
My analysis was on age of death. With the assumption that an increase in deaths in younger populations would be a signal.
I scraped only date of birth, and date of death to get ages.
The text of the obits almost never include cause of death, so I did not analyze that.
I gave up on this project after about 4 months because it seemed there were a lot of fake obituaries. I saw obituaries for cats and dogs, as well as obituaries that looked like disturbing pranks.
I don't get the feeling that these fake obits only started since the pandemic, and there is no way there were millions of them.
Replying to myself here. No need to do any explaining, I just did my homework and read your previous posts on this topic. Your method is solid and I believe the idea that even this messy data can still provide valuable signals is spot on. Mainly because there is no legitimate reason that the data was any messier, (or less messy) prior to 2020. So trends ought to be consistent.
Yes. I also wonder if this sort of memory holing is happening on a voluntary public site, then what may be going on in other official databases that we have less free reign to poke around in???
People who had a relative die, will they still be able to find the obituary?
That is a great question. Who were those 2.3 million people? Why were they chosen to be dumped? Maybe someone can get AI to do a quick scan.
There always seems to be a lot of voiceless victims on every depop topic.
At the end of 2021 I was doing an obituary scraping project with this website. My data storage was very limited, so I focused just on Texas.
My analysis was on age of death. With the assumption that an increase in deaths in younger populations would be a signal.
I scraped only date of birth, and date of death to get ages.
The text of the obits almost never include cause of death, so I did not analyze that.
I gave up on this project after about 4 months because it seemed there were a lot of fake obituaries. I saw obituaries for cats and dogs, as well as obituaries that looked like disturbing pranks.
I don't get the feeling that these fake obits only started since the pandemic, and there is no way there were millions of them.
I am interested in learning your methodology.
Replying to myself here. No need to do any explaining, I just did my homework and read your previous posts on this topic. Your method is solid and I believe the idea that even this messy data can still provide valuable signals is spot on. Mainly because there is no legitimate reason that the data was any messier, (or less messy) prior to 2020. So trends ought to be consistent.
I wonder what the insurance actuaries have to say about the ongoing deaths among the young, after Ed Dowd highlighted it in his work
Yes. I also wonder if this sort of memory holing is happening on a voluntary public site, then what may be going on in other official databases that we have less free reign to poke around in???
Thanks June. I appreciate that. Honestly, this is breaking my heart.
Astounding.
I am shocked, to say the least. What evil ... to die and then be removed from history.