The Centers for Disease Control took a step May 1 towards shedding light on the pandemic’s true death toll.
The CDC published a new tool on its website that calculates excess deaths in the United States from January 2017 to the present day, providing a baseline of the average U.S. mortality rate compared with what’s been observed.
The data reveals that, for the week ending April 11, the United States saw 79,761 deaths — a 36.8 percent increase over the norm. In the same week, New York City recorded 7,029 deaths — a whopping 526.5 percent increase from the city’s weekly norm.
The CDC gathers mortality data from state governments around the country on a weekly basis. Though the early numbers are raw and may have duplicates or other errors, they provide a rough estimate of the COVID-19 pandemic’s true toll.
The data shows deaths both of people who tested positive for COVID and of those who likely would not have died, but for the pandemic. That total could include people who died of COVID but were never diagnosed, or those who put off needed doctor’s appointments or had to wait too long for overtaxed ambulances.
The new tool is the first centralized source of data on U.S. excess deaths, updated in relative realtime. Reporting lags mean that the most accurate national data is around two weeks behind the current date.
The CDC’s graphics take into account reporting lags, and offer the option for “weighted” counts. Those numbers project excess deaths to account for what the CDC describes as “potential underreporting” by states.
Before now, most excess death reporting relied on piecemeal releases by local authorities. New York City, for example, released data last month suggesting that, including COVID-related deaths, there had been around 13,500 excess deaths in the five boroughs as the pandemic peaked.
And cue the un-release of the tool in 3…2…
Probably the most important story on TPM this week.
Trump is touting how the numbers are low, always low, compared to a whatever mythical worst case / public doesn’t care about their own lives estimate he wants to use to make himself look better. Excess death counts – something that no state can fake to keep their COVID-related counts down – will certainly show that the US is well over 100K deaths already, and probably will end up over 200K by the end of summer.
The other factor that mitigates in favor of a higher COVID-19 death count, as opposed to some of the other deaths that might have been prevented without COVID-19 but are not COVID-19 related, is that there are certainly far fewer deaths from traffic accidents or other events that get reduced as people spend far more time at home.
Trump and R governors and those asshole protesters act on wishful thinking and assertions that things aren’t as bad as they seem. The excess death count is a reality check they all need and reporters should question them aggressively on it.
Absolutely correct. But here’s the problem. The right wing will start screaming, if they haven’t started already, as to how these numbers are ‘cooked’ to make the President look bad. I saw this yesterday with a right-winger who claimed his sister, who’s a nurse, is constantly hearing from the doctors in her hospital to note that the death of a patient was caused by the virus, even if it wasn’t.
My thought here is that, if that’s true, medical boards all over the country should be swamped with complaints about these lying doctors who should lose their licenses to practice. I can’t imagine anyone with that much investment in their education demanding that others lie about patient losses. But here we are, even having to discuss the remote possibility that deaths happened with the virus not even involved being reported in these numbers.
This isn’t going to go over well. It’s what I’ve been saying, and maybe this pandemic will force a resolution to this issue, but the reporting is what is making people feel the lockdowns are invalid. We don’t know what we don’t know, but changing the methodology in mid-stream isn’t going to help against the virulent ‘Liberate’ movement and is only going to make things worse.
From Florida will simply stop reporting. To them it’s a public relations problem not a national emergency
“Excess death”
What a shameful term to use.
Why belittle a life like that?
trump is a clear and present danger to all of humankind.