> Serious question, how many of those people would have died in the past 12 months if they didn't get COVID? The number is most likely not 500,000, but it also probably isn't 0.
This can be answered using “excess mortality” data.
Studies have shown during that time period, about 600,000 more people died than would have been expected compared to deaths in the previous year.
The official covid death count is likely an undercount of deaths caused by covid, because a number of people died from covid related complications and got recorded as pneumonia, Alzheimer’s, or heart disease/attack/stroke related deaths.
> The official covid death count is likely an undercount of deaths caused by covid, because a number of people died from covid related complications and got recorded as pneumonia, Alzheimer’s, or heart disease/attack/stroke related deaths.
That's a theory. Meanwhile, we know that many places are classifying anyone who dies within N days of a positive test (N is typically 30) as a "covid death", regardless of actual cause.
I can guarantee that not all of those people died from Covid-19. Point being: there's likely to be overcount and undercount, for different reasons.
>There is also a good chance that COVID mortality in the US is being significantly overcounted.
It seems experts (CDC among other) suggest the mortality is quite a bit undercounted, since there are many deaths for which the person is not tested, since we lacked the testing capabilities.
One interesting place to see it is expected death rates versus actual death rates while COVID is here, and note there is no other known thing that spiked at the same time to account for the excess deaths.
What science groups or medical groups are claiming it's overcounted?
Based on what definition? The CDC admitted that 94% of the deaths attributed to COVID in the United States were deaths with COVID. The average age of death was the same as the average life expectancy in the US. The average COVID "death" had over two (2) serious comorbidities.
> for now we assume that total COVID-19 deaths equal excess mortality.
This seems reasonable, although I'd suggest it's an underestimate of COVID-19 deaths.
Excess deaths counts have been consistently showing negative in countries during periods of time where they have coronavirus under control.
Other significant causes of death (including suicide, influenza, road traffic accidents) appear to be down.
As such, I'd assume that COVID-19 deaths are likely somewhat higher than excess mortality figures. I'm prepared to accept the assumption that they're approximately the same.
[Edited to note: the linked article discusses this with further detail and evidence]
> Ascribing all excess deaths to coronavirus is a mistake.
I worded my statement intentionally.
> It's also most likely still an undercount
Some of the excess deaths will be other things. It will take more careful analysis to come up with reasonable breakdowns, and what percentage is likely covid-19 deaths.
> “I think people need to be aware that the data they’re seeing on deaths is very incomplete,” said Dan Weinberger, a Yale professor of epidemiology who led the analysis for The Post.
> Those excess deaths — the number beyond what would normally be expected for that time of year — are not necessarily attributable directly to covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. They could include people with unrelated maladies who avoided hospitals for fear of being exposed or who couldn’t get the care they needed from overwhelmed health systems, as well as some number of deaths that are part of the ordinary variation in the death rate. The number is affected by increases or decreases in other categories of deaths, such as traffic fatalities and homicides.
> But excess deaths are a starting point for scientists to assess the overall impact of the pandemic.
> At least 8448 people have died of COVID-19 in New York City
Just to add: be very careful to compare deaths across countries. Every country seems to count deaths differently. Some only count it if you didn't have any other condition. E.g. you had something with your lungs? That death might not be reported.
In Netherlands they compared the amount of people dying per week. There was a sudden huge increase of deaths. It seemed to indicate the number of deaths for Netherlands was 2x as high as they were reporting. Though they did report the deaths with a very clear remark that the numbers were highly likely to be too low. Unfortunately such remarks were often ignored by the public, leading to eventual distrust of any figure. Interestingly, the press at various times did make it clear that the figure could be unreliable. Seems people often just read a headline :-p
PS: My point is that the 8448 might be greatly higher. Depends on how the 8448 was collected/reported.
> I also suspect that if you do the simple calculation "excess mortality minus confirmed COVID deaths", this will be an overestimate, because many COVID deaths are misclassified as something else, e.g. pneumonia.
I think it depends on the country - a lot of countries are labelling any deaths with COVID symptoms as COVID (even though the symptoms are common to other illnesses like the flu).
In these countries it will likely be an overestimate.
> In Slovakia, the total mortality this year is lower than in the comparable period during previous years.
Yes, COVID has been fairly benign in a lot of countries and a massive killer of the old in others.
"Summing up the excess mortality estimates across all countries in our dataset gives 3.3 million excess deaths. In contrast, summing up the official COVID-19 death counts gives only 2.1 million deaths."
Interestingly enough, their conclusion was that covid deaths are being undercounted:
"At the time of writing, the world’s official COVID-19 death count is 2.9 million. Our results suggest that the true toll may be above 4.5 million."
> So far 200,000 people have died from the coronavirus.
No. We don't know the numbers because most countries don't have the numbers yet. This 200,000 number includes data from countries like the UK or US who are only counting confirmed covid-19 deaths. We know that deaths outside hospital make up about half the total, so we'd expect about 400,000 deaths.
It's almost certainly resulted in a larger number than that already.
Estimating the true number of people who have already died of COVID-19 is difficult.
I've seen estimates ranging from 15% more to 4x more than the "confirmed" figure, which itself has increased from 100,000 to ~190,000 over the last 2 weeks.
That's the number of "confirmed" deaths, by some meaning of confirmed. Some of the contributing figures only counting people in hospital at the time of death, and even that with a significant time delay.
How many more people have died during the pandemic than we would expect to have died based on past trends? The NYT had a tracker (which they stopped updating) that showed the number of excess deaths was not much higher than than confirmed COVID-19 deaths. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/14/us/covid-19-d...
At the end of the day, the question is, how many more deaths happened due to COVID than there would be otherwise. For that answer, we can look at excess mortality (which the article uses), which shows more deaths than the official COVID death tally.
>but it's also a methodology that should be likely to give a high side estimate
It's the same methodology they use for all diseases. If it's too high an estimate, they'd pretty quickly find it since it would overcount enough reasons fro death that totals would not match measured death totals.
In my original post I linked evidence and the expert reasons why counting is likely low.
>Outside of New York/New Jersey and Massachusetts, I don't find a high disparity in the excess death ratio that supports the idea that there is significant under reporting of deaths.
The CDC link had many states with many thousands of excess deaths. And remember CDC death count lags actual death counts by a few weeks, so the 118k-154k (95%-ile) they list is to be compared to COVID as of a few weeks ago, which was under 110K two weeks ago. So taking the median gives around 136K actual deaths (prob not all COVID, but majority so) vs 110K reported - approx 20% undercounted.
>So are more people having heart attacks? Is Covid causing heart attacks?
Both of those are likely true [1]. Research since then is looking like COVID is killing asymptomatic people via attacking the heart.
>I don't feel comfortable pushing the idea that we are under-reporting deaths or over-reporting deaths because I think that we don't actually know
I've found significant decent groups and projects claiming undercounting, many with decent empirical evidence. I've not found the opposite, despite looking. I posted a few to get you started - discount as you wish.
>the discrepancy between reported deaths and analyses of death rates compared to expected death rates, sometimes referred to as “excess mortality,” suggests that the total COVID-19 death rate is many multiples larger than official reports.
So...not as many people died as we thought were going to so we're now just going to arbitrarily say any excess death was a covid death just to make sure the numbers look like what we think they should?
These are the kinds of statistical shenanigans that have been going on all year and people wonder why people question 'the science.'
> How many death (death as in due to covid not with covid) ?
Approximately 1.1 Million people in the entire world, approximately 3 times as many as malaria deaths, closing in on as many as TB deaths, and about twice as many as influenza or AIDS.
All the numbers you've ever heard for deaths from any disease have the same artifacts as the Covid-19 deaths, if not much worse (e.g. numbers for the flu are normally only estimates based on number of hospital cases and symptoms).
This can be answered using “excess mortality” data.
Studies have shown during that time period, about 600,000 more people died than would have been expected compared to deaths in the previous year.
The official covid death count is likely an undercount of deaths caused by covid, because a number of people died from covid related complications and got recorded as pneumonia, Alzheimer’s, or heart disease/attack/stroke related deaths.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/14/us/covid-19-d...
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