How we've been tracking the reports of people "dying suddenly," and what our numbers show
A breakdown of our methodology (with some history of that obituary phrase), and a glance at how the media has been deployed to NORMALIZE this ongoing catastrophe
By Charlotte Hervis
Do you have the feeling that reports of people “dying suddenly” have multiplied dramatically these past few years, and that the number keeps on growing week by week? If you have that feeling, it’s not just you, because that uptick in reports of people “dying suddenly,” and their ever-growing number, are facts beyond dispute.
Analysis of long term trends across the news online confirms that there has been a spike in such reports these past three years. The number of reports of people “dying suddenly” rose from an average of 4,346 items per month in late 2020, to an average of 5,517 in 2021, 7,287 in 2022 and, from January to August this year, there have been on average 7,910 news items each month citing this phrase alone. That’s a marked rate of change - a 22% rise in average volumes late 2020 into 2021, a 37% rise between 2021 and 2022. The dotted line indicates the upward trend over time.
It is important to explore this broad recent historical context across a large body of data, before we delve further into the trends we see from our own research and cataloging of sudden, unexplained deaths, which have been posted here on News from Underground since early 2022.
The trend visible across online news over the past three years reflects content across 173 countries, from some of the world’s biggest global news sites. (MSN, Yahoo!, Daily Mail and The Sun are among the most prolific sources of content featuring this term.) In fact, 6% of references came from the top global news sites (ranked by web traffic, as listed recently by Press Gazette).
As reports of people “dying suddenly” have multiplied dramatically worldwide, the media has tried to play that increase down, either by ignoring it completely, or by noting certain evidence of excess deaths, in some country and/or ethnographic group, but attributing that rise to something other than the one and only thing most likely to have caused it. Thus we’ve read that all those “sudden deaths” are due to (for example):