Okay, some morons are claiming the number of covid deaths were bogus- that any death were covid was present - even say an automobile accident- was counted as a covid death. I say- mostly bullshit. So, during the covid “dying time” was the overall death rate higher? In other words- over 1 million Americans died due to covid, per stats. Was the number way way over the expected death rates from all other causes?
And of course, we did see a decline in auto accident deaths during the shut-down.
Yes, the overall death rate was higher.
This CDC page is a one-stop shop for questions like this. Scroll down to the graphic titled “Weekly number of deaths (from all causes)”. There are also a lot of downloadable spreadsheets and such hosted on the page.
This is worth a read as well – from February of this year.
Nearly 1,170,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the United States according to official federal counts, but multiple excess mortality studies suggest that these totals are vastly undercounted. While excess mortality provides an estimation of deaths that likely would not have occurred under normal, non-pandemic conditions, there is still little evidence into whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus contributed to these additional deaths, or whether these deaths were caused by other factors such as healthcare disruptions or socioeconomic challenges.
Now, a new study led by the School of Public Health and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) provides the first concrete data showing that many of these excess deaths were indeed uncounted COVID-19 deaths.
Published in the journal PNAS, the study compared reported COVID-19 deaths to excess deaths due to non-COVID, natural causes, such as diseases and chronic illnesses, and found that increases in non-COVID excess deaths occurred at the same time or in the month prior to increases in reported COVID-19 deaths in most US counties.
Focusing on excess deaths by natural causes rather than all-cause excess death estimates provides a more accurate understanding of the true number of deaths attributable to COVID-19, as it eliminates external causes for mortality, such as intentional or unintentional injuries, for which COVID-19 would not be a contributing factor.
Right. My dad died from pneumonia a few months after he had contracted and recovered from COVID (April 2020)- basically it did enough lung damage and whatever else that he was more susceptible to pneumonia.
I’m not sure if he’s counted as a COVID death or not, but he sure should be.
Initially, in my state, deaths where covid was even suspected were labeled as covid, until the health department could comb through each and every record to determine the exact cause.
See:
Somebody from my high school was frothing at the mouth on Facebook, early on; her mother had passed away in a hospital. IIRC, proximal cause of death was heart failure or something, and she was ranting about SUING THEM if Covid was listed on the death certificate. I don’t recall whether her mother had even been diagnosed with Covid.
I’m honestly not sure what her heartburn was. May have been related to the rumors that doctors were intentionally mislabelling non-COVID patients as having COVID due to it leading to higher reimbursements, or something. But clearlly she thought that there were a lot of invalid claims of death by COVID.
I mean, just look at the fatality graph from 1990-2022
(It doesn’t seem to load up the second time for me, so here are the numbers from 2010):
Fatalities in millions:
2009 - 2.44
2011 - 2.52
2013 - 2.6
2015 - 2.71
2017 - 2.81
2019 - 2.85
2020 - 3.38
2021 - 3.46
2022 - 3.27
There’s like 400K-500K extra deaths there in 2020 all of a sudden. Let’s look up what the reported COVID deaths are for 2020, 2021, 2022.
2020 had 352,00 COVID deaths according to Johns Hopkins.
2021 had 353,000 according to the same.
2022 had 245,000 according to the CDC
If anything, it feels like we are somewhat undercounting deaths due to COVID.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but dead’s dead. Why would she be angry or upset about what the doctor put on the death certificate?
The idea was that the COVID death numbers were being artificially inflated.
Total excess deaths, by itself, isn’t necessarily the best metric, because that’ll also catch, for instance, excess deaths due to social distancing, and going by just the timing, it’ll be very difficult to distinguish those from deaths due to covid. You need a deeper dive into the data, like the one @bordelond linked to.
But due to social distancing and all of those people staying home, other infectious diseases like the flu were less likely to spread.
And in the case of the flu, we have direct evidence that the numbers of flu cases and deaths were significantly lower for 2020 and 2021.
ETA: And not just in the US.
Also, if people were staying home rather than commuting to work, there should have been fewer traffic deaths.
One of my co-workers remarked that wearing a mask to help against covid prevented the usual colds and flu like symptoms she usually caught during the year. She was considering continuing to wear a mask.
On the other hand, it’s recommended that one check in with elderly relatives frequently, in person, to make sure that they’re remembering to take all of their meds, they’re remembering to eat, they’re not injured, and so on. People really do die from those things, and those deaths would be up from social isolation.
You’d think so, but they went up.
The best explanation I’ve heard for this is that less traffic made it possible to travel at higher rates of speed - which increases the likelihood of fatalities should a crash occur.
Oh, sure. But it’s a reasonable first-order approximation and when dealing with idiots that deny the COVID death toll, there’s no reason to make it more complex and caveat the hell out of it. The jump in death numbers is simple and clear. Have them figure out where all the deaths came from. FTR, I do think we are likely under- rather than overcounting.
Also, the rumor that doctors were doing so in order to claim inflated reimbursements from Medicare etc.
Plus… it’s all a hoax, right?
Are Doctors and Hospitals Paid More for COVID-19 Patients? | Snopes.com