Over the weekend, I took 2018-12, 2019-01 and 2019-02 death stats and compared them to 2019-12, 2020-01, 2020-02. The data comes from the JP govt [1] The results (and a copy of the source data) are are in a Google Sheet [2].
Basically the number of deaths is just too high and changes too much from year to year to see corona in there. Japan has 250k deaths in Jan and 120k in Dec and Feb. Even if they are under-reporting by a factor of 10, it would still be lost in the noise. There's no smoking gun in there and I think the excess deaths concept really only becomes useful when you have emergency medicine collapse and people start dying from all kinds of usually-treatable things. Maybe when you have good categorization and you can remove all the car crashes and cancers etc. Then you might start to see corona effects clearly but we don't have that.
The flu stats [3] were also updated today and they added 4 weeks of data instead of just one and that does look like a smoking gun to me.
To me that looks like about 100-150 deaths counted as flu above what would be expected. That's for Tokyo. Data is missing for many of the other cities. Most that have data show a drop, in line with expectations as due to everyone wearing masks and washing their hands. Why would Tokyo be different? Well it's tempting to go with a Tokyo-Olympic related conspiracy :) but maybe Tokyo has had a bigger corona problem for longer than anyone really knew. It's the biggest destination for foreigners, it's super easy to spread and contact tracing in Tokyo is a nightmare, so spread could easily happen under the radar, given the low testing we had. So the less touristy cities would be less infected and would see flu drop as it should while Tokyo saw flu replaces by corona. Also Nagoya seems to drop and then jump up, consistent with it briefly being the worst infected area. I should look at the per-prefecture graphs of corona to see if Nagoya's corona increase lines up.
So nationally it's still 100-150 tops. Maybe corona deaths were under-counted and should have been 50% higher but it's not the 5-10x smoking Howitzer that it might have been.
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