Yes. If someone dies at home and its not weird. . They are old, or otherwise in decline, the body goes straight to the funeral home. Same for a nursing facility. I guess a coroner looks at them at some point,but medicine is done with them, unless you want to pay for a autopsy.
It doesn’t even say that. It says it’s not happening, but that there could be a lot of good info if it did happen, and some places are trying to do more, basically.
“Those changes won’t happen at once or uniformly across the country, experts predict. In addition, an increase in postmortem testing is likely to put coroners and medical examiners in the middle of a debate heating up about the true number of COVID-19 casualties.”
(Snipped)
"Even now, months after the emergence of COVID-19 in the United States, the availability of test kits and testing materials, such as nasal swabs, remains inadequate in many places. Public health experts agree that broad-based testing is critical for people to safely emerge from lockdown and for businesses and other institutions to safely reopen.
"‘Some localities are prioritizing testing sick people over dead people, and that’s probably a good decision if they have limited testing available,’ says Dr. Sally Aiken, the medical examiner for Spokane County, Washington, who is also president of the National Association of Medical Examiners.
“As availability increases, however, stepping up postmortem COVID-19 testing could uncover important clues about the spread of the virus, experts say.”
The problem with using an average of the previous years as a baseline is that deaths, like population, increase every year. So there should always be more deaths from one year to the next. In recent years, deaths have increased about 2% per year.
And posters have already pointed out the problem with starting at week 1. Flu deaths cause the greatest variance in the death numbers, and peak flu season lasts through February. Since most coronavirus deaths didn’t occur until March, it would make sense to leave the first two months out of the equation.
I summed the deaths of weeks 12 through 23 for every year, which was Mar 15 through June 6 for 2020. This is what I came up with:
2014 595360
2015 615029 19669
2016 623131 8102
2017 639902 16771
2018 639410 -492
2019 654591 15181
2020 787546 132955
The third column is the number of deaths more than the previous year. 2018 is an outlier probably because of displaced mortality. A really bad flu season killed over 50,000 Americans 65+, so people who would have died in the spring were taken out earlier by the flu in the winter.
If we posit that there should be 15,000 more deaths in 2020 than 2019, that means there were about 118,000 excess deaths. According to Worldometer, there were 114,500 official COVID deaths in that time period. So it’s hard to tell from the data if there is an undercount.
I suspect that the CDC numbers are not final for those weeks in 2020, and more deaths will be added later.
Certainly, increasing population could account for some or all of the observed difference.