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COVID update: US deaths are low, but everyone else is lower

Just to keep everyone up to date, here's what COVID-19 mortality in the US looks like these days:

We are currently running at about 350 COVID deaths per day.

27 thoughts on “COVID update: US deaths are low, but everyone else is lower

    1. Eve

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      1. iamr4man

        If Florida had California’s Covid death rate over 30,000 Floridians would still be alive. There was a time when Florida and California had similar death rates. But that was before DeSantis decided decided to sacrifice Floridians to his presidential aspirations..

  1. Jerry O'Brien

    There has been a surge in U.S. death reports over the last week, and a lot of it can be traced to certain states adding extraordinary numbers to their totals on single days. If you check the hospitalization totals, they keep sloping down nationally. So it's not as bad as the chart tells you.

    To take another tack, it's possible that total deaths from all causes might be more consistently and correctly reported than deaths blamed on covid. Fortunately, Our World in Data also has charts for excess mortality.

    https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-daily-per-100k-economist

    Here are their figures for excess daily deaths per 100,000, averaged over the week ending December 26, 2022:

    1.39 Germany
    0.68 Denmark
    0.64 France
    0.50 Italy
    0.50 Ireland
    0.40 Netherlands
    0.39 United States
    0.37 United Kingdom
    0.37 Switzerland
    0.11 Spain
    0.11 Portugal
    0.10 Canada
    -0.06 Mexico

    I believe December 26 is the most recent date for which Our World in Data has complete mortality data for the United States. It's also around the maximum for confirmed covid deaths in both Europe and the U.S this past winter.

    Now, some of these numbers still seem out of whack. Germany had a large surge, but I don't think they had as many covid deaths at the end of December as this table suggests. And Our World in Data probably doesn't have complete death counts from Mexico, and maybe some other countries.

    Anyway, though weird things can happen with the data and with various causes of death, not just covid, during the pandemic era, it does not appear that Americans have been getting killed off more than everyone else in recent months. Things were different the first couple years.

  2. Jasper_in_Boston

    We are currently running at about 350 COVID deaths per day.

    Of all the ways this pandemic could've played out if you'd asked me in March, 2020, "an annual death toll equivlant to an addtional two rather bad influenza seasons with no end in sight, and likely continuing for years" was not how I would've called it.

    But that is indeed what we're looking at now, correct? A new and rather potent killer that will plague our species perpetually for the foreseeable future. Does this sound about right?

  3. jte21

    Like Jerry O'Brien observed upthread, the World of Data numbers only go to the end of last year, but here's the breakdown of Covid deaths vaxxed vs. unvaxxed (per 100k) at the very end of 2022.

    Unvaccinated: 2.99
    Vaccinated w/o booster: .70
    Vaccinated w/ bivalent booster: .31

    To put that in perspective, in 2020, fatal car crashes in California amounted to about 9 deaths per 100k (Source: IIHS). Covid is still serious, particularly for the very sick and/or elderly. But if you're boosted, esp. with the bivalent booster, your chances of Covid being a fatal illness now are vanishingly small. What this means, however, is that some kind of semi-annual or annual booster is probably going to be required from now on depending on what future variants emerge. Right now, however, if you're fully vaxxed/boosted, you're far more likely to succumb to any number of other illnesses or accidents before Covid.

    1. KJK

      I don't know what is happening in other countries, but here in the good old US of A, I absolutely blame Fox News and the entire right wing media empire for much of this. Every time I insist that my mom get a covid booster or when covid is making a comeback at her assisted living facility, she complains about the value of the vaccine and that it can't prevent you from getting covid. I need to remind her every time that the value of the vaccine is that it will keep her out of the hospital, intensive care, and the funeral home. Of course Fox News is blaring from her TV most times I visit and she voted for Trump twice, after being a liberal Democrat for decades.

      FYI, she will be 100 in a few months and had Covid this January, which she got over in just a few days with mild symptoms. Her mind is still as sharp as ever.

      1. jte21

        There are anti-vax movements in other countries as well, such as Germany, but they're not being boosted (har) by a round-the-clock media empire reinforcing anti-science and anti-government narratives. The other problem is that a lot of the science reporting over the past year on Omicron and the bivalent booster have screaming headlines about how "New Variant Ten Times More Infectious Than Previous Ones! -- Can Rapidly Evade New Vaccine!" Of course the buried lede is almost always about how this is based on laboratory trials in a petri dish or whatever and we don't really know how this will play out at the population level, etc. And most laypeople don't distinguish easily between a likelihood of catching Covid vs. a likelihood of becoming seriously ill with Covid. So then we wonder why people, many of whom are not necessarily right-wing Kool-Aid drinkers, are figuring it's not worth it.

        1. Jasper_in_Boston

          There are anti-vax movements in other countries as well, such as Germany, but they're not being boosted (har) by a round-the-clock media empire reinforcing anti-science and anti-government narratives.

          Uh, in the US it's not just media. It's vast swaths of the country's political leadership and machinery of state. In fact, about half of it.

  4. middleoftheroaddem

    My wife is an emergency room Dr. She mentioned that countries count Covid deaths differently. Broadly stated, you have:

    - death as a direct result of Covid

    - death where Covid was a contributing factor. Think a person who is already very ill from advance diabetes, who also has Covid

    - death where Covid is ancillary, or even inconsequential, to a death. A person come in after a very serious car crash, and tests positive for Covid.

    The point, the US is counting all three of these categories as Covid deaths. Each country, has its own accounting standard around counting Covid deaths.
    -

    1. jdubs

      Your third category is incorrect. While i cant attest to every death certificate, neither the CDC nor any of the states follow that approach.

      The particular example of a car crash is used frequently by those trying to discount covid, attack the govt for tricking americans and various conspiracy theorists (big overlap with those pushing the car death myth and the lab leak tale).

      The first two certainly make sense to count as Covid deaths and ultimately it is up to the medical doctor or coroner to identify the cause of death and directly contributing factors.

      Excess deaths is a better method of comparing regions and countries.

      1. middleoftheroaddem

        jdubs - will intellectually I agree with you, in practice at the hospital my wife works, ALL folks who die with Covid are reported.

        Perhaps there is a secondary step at a Federal agency, maybe the CDC, to refine the data but that process is far from certain and likely imperfect.

        Note, my point was NOT to minimize the significance of Covid. Rather, to point out, when comparing these figures across countries the accounting standards are likely not equal. For example, you realize that the US counts a live birth differently than the Netherlands....

    2. Austin

      death where Covid is ancillary, or even inconsequential, to a death. A person come in after a very serious car crash, and tests positive for Covid.

      The point, the US is counting all three of these categories as Covid deaths.

      Shocking. Roadkillfakedem makes up shit with no source named other than “his” “wife” who is a “Dr.” Literally nobody in the US has attributed a car crash death to “died from Covid.” Thanks for playing, roadkillfakedem, collect your parting gifts on your way out of this country cause we don’t need you here metaphorically (and possibly literally) shitting all over everything.

      1. middleoftheroaddem

        Austin - while it would be juvenile to respond to your full post, I will clarify one point, potentially, it was confusing.

        I am not claiming, that the traffic victim (in my example) died from Covid. Rather, the traffic victim, because he had Covid, is counted as dying with Covid. And yes, I am claiming that the tally the US presents of Covid deaths, includes folks, similar to the car victim,

        1. jdubs

          But your claim is wrong.

          If you had Covid at the time of your death and it played no role in your death, you arent counted as a Covid death. This has been addressed a thousand times after the pro-covid hystericals used the car death hypothetical early in the crisis to falsely claim that the US govt was inflating covid deaths in order to do....something!!

          I appreciate the humor in your 'but my wife is a Dr!' opening. Good credibility grab, but youre still peddling misinformation.

    3. mmcgowan1

      A death certificate has two parts. Part 1 lists the chain of events that lead to death. For example, stroke due to uncontrolled hypertension due to renal arterial stenosis due to atherosclerosis.

      Part 2 lists conditions that contributed to the cause of death but were outside the chain of events. That might include chronic kidney disease, diabetes, or high cholesterol.

      A person who might otherwise have been expected to survive injuries from a car crash might have been fatally weakened by pre-existing conditions. Those conditions, if they genuinely contributed to death, would be listed in part 2. Still, if the condition had no relation to the death (e.g., dermatitis), it has no place on the death certificate. Certificates by law must be completed based on the physicians best medical judgement.

      For statistical reporting purposes, we count deaths according to the causes listed in Part 1 and not the contributing conditions listed in Part 2, which are there as a source of additional public health information.

      1. middleoftheroaddem

        mmcgowan1 - thank you for the response, you clearly know much more about death certificates than me.

        Rather, based on a dinner table discussion between a couple of Doctors (yes, jdus that includes my wife) hospitals received extra funding under the CARES ACT, for treating a Covid patient. So yes, my theoretical car accident patent is more profitable to the hospital, assuming its true, if the presence of Covid is also listed.

    4. Gilgit

      I'm afraid your critics are right about this. Every time there is a conspiracy theory about anything, people who have some connection will believe it even though they have never seen any evidence of it. Noting somewhere that someone had Covid and reporting that in official death statistics to the government are two different things. No doctor anywhere does both those things. There are not government spybots looking at test results so they can record Covid deaths when people die of something else. Your wife is just repeating a conspiracy theory she heard somewhere.

  5. skeptonomist

    Again, the really interesting comparison is between the US and the "similar" countries that Kevin always shows on the one hand and the Asian countries which managed to avoid high death totals on the other:

    https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=jpn&areas=nzl&areas=aus&areas=kor&areas=idn&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usnm&areasRegional=uspr&areasRegional=usaz&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=usnd&cumulative=1&logScale=0&per100K=1&startDate=2020-03-01&values=deaths

    Some of these are naturally isolated but others apparently managed to keep infection isolated internally. Did all these countries take a terrible hit economically because of isolation and/or shutdown? Even if they did it could be important to know that it is possible to keep rates down in case the next pandemic is really deadly.

    China could belong to this class of countries which stayed locked down until everybody was vaccinated. We don't really get the data from China to know, and the media and others are making it up instead.

  6. Special Newb

    This is where the shitty health of Americans (fat and diabetic) shines through imo. We're not hugely worse but enough to significant

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