5 Comments
Apr 20Liked by Saloni Dattani

I really love this, excellent visualizations and explanations of each. I would be thrilled if you did a similar set of visualizations that look at “risk factors“ for mortality. I love using good visualizations for risk factors to help people understand exactly how they should prioritize their efforts not to die, at various ages.

Expand full comment
Apr 20Liked by Saloni Dattani

Very nice graphs

I wonder how one could calculate the "number of life years lost" due to a particular cause of death, if it's even a coherent concept

I feel like it would match the idea of the "seriousness" or "importance" of a particular danger relatively well

Expand full comment

Am I correct in my understanding that visualization #3 "What are the risks of dying from different causes at each age?" is essentially visualization #4 "What are people dying from at different ages?" but with a "still living" category added?

Expand full comment

Stacked plots like #1 and #3 are pretty poor, in my opinion. The only thing you can easily read off of them is the total, which you could have gotten with a simple line plot. You can sort of get a crude sense of the breakdown of causes at a particular age, but it's hard to judge the proportions. It's really hard to judge how causes change over time; readers will miss all but the most dramatic changes. Since the only thing that is actually reliable is the top line, you're better off just to print that, and look for some other way to convey the breakdown by cause.

Expand full comment

It's interesting to consider the messaging from "the experts" in light of this thorough analysis. I wonder if they are reviewing the tape so they perform better next time... I am not optimistic.

Expand full comment