Taiwan's Department of Household Registration provides
monthly statistics going back to January 2013, including the total number of births and deaths per month. I consider these raw numbers to be reasonably reliable
Since January 2021, there have been more deaths than births every single month -- for 19 months and counting. -- and the gap is rapidly widening. Does this have anything to do with the birdemic or the peck? Let's zoom in on the 2020-2022 period.
Taiwan started pecking in March 2021, and half the population was pecked by September. The birdemic itself didn't start in earnest until May 2022, with only a negligible number of "cases" and birdemic-attributed deaths before that; by the time the birdemic started, about 85% of the population was already pecked.
Insofar as there has been a recent drop in births, over and above the gradual downward trend that has been going on for at least a decade, it appears to have started in January 2021, before either pecks or birdemic. As discussed in my earlier post, "
Reports of the 'depopulation of Taiwan' may have been somewhat exaggerated," Igor Chudov has made much of the fact that the June 2022 birthrate was 23% lower than the June 2021 birthrate, calling this an astronomically unlikely "26-sigma event," but as you can see, fluctuation of that magnitude is actually quite normal. (Chudov's "26-sigma" label came from the insane assumption that the standard deviation for births-per-month would be proportional to that of births-per-year.)
June 2022 is nine months after half the population had been pecked, which I think is too early to see any peck-induced decline in fertility. Older people were pecked first, so I assume the number of women of childbearing age who had been pecked by September 2021 must have been much lower than 50% -- how much lower I can't be sure. If the pecks have drastically impacted fertility, as suggested by anecdotal evidence, that likely won't be statistically obvious until around the end of the year. The period between now and February is especially important, because after February (9 months after the start of the birdemic in Taiwan) it will (in theory anyway!) be hard to disentangle the effects of the peck from those of the birdemic itself.
As for the recent uptick in deaths, that golden window of unambiguity has already passed, and the data is inconclusive. Any post-peck-pre-birdemic increase in mortality is too slight to separate from the overall background trend of gradually increasing death rates (presumably due to the fact that the population is aging). The relatively high death rate since May 2022 (if it is in fact the beginning of a trend, not just random noise) could in theory be due to the birdemic, the pecks, or any combination of the two.
I'll probably follow these numbers for the rest of the year just out of idle curiosity -- but that's really all it is. Can we really expect any new data to change anyone's mind about the birdemic or the pecks this late in the game?
