Excess Deaths at 60,000 Nationally
By: Michael Lukianoff
Tags: Public Health Crisis, Politics, Covid-19, Data Science, Analytics

Excess Deaths at 60,000 Nationally

Spikes in Non-Covid Deaths During Virus Peaks Nullifies Conspiracists’ Over-count Assertions

There is a pervasive conspiracy fallacy (I don’t give them the validation of calling them theories) in the US that the official tally of Covid deaths is being artificially inflated because crooked officials in hospitals and morgues across the country are falsifying documents and putting the cause of death as Covid-19 rather than the true cause of death. Yes, everything from car accidents to falling off a ladder is being attributed to Covid and of course all flu and pneumonia deaths regardless of whether they had additional Covid symptoms or not — or so the conspiracy fallacy goes. I had the misfortune just yesterday of being re-educated on how ill informed I was about how vast numbers of rank and file employees who are willing to risk their jobs, incur fines and even lose medical licenses for falsifying medical documents in order to inflate Covid-19 numbers. Some for political reasons, and some because Medicare apparently pays the hospital more for Covid patients (strange that we haven’t seen any massive Medicare fraud indictments out of DOJ yet).

In a very timely article, this morning’s New York Times featured an analysis of CDC data looking into the excess death rate, both nationally and by state. Nationwide, the ‘excess deaths’ or the number of deaths greater than in a normal year that are not being counted as Covid-19 deaths is 60,000. That alone is insufficient to conclude a connection to Covid, but when we look state-by-state at when those deaths occurred, we see the clear pattern that they happened during virus surges in States at the times when we know the medical facilities were being inundated by Covid cases.

Many of the excess deaths may not be cases of Covid-19, but when Hospitals and staff are overrun entire floors or departments are re-designated for Covid, other illnesses take a back seat. During the peak of the outbreak in NYC the national guard was dispatched with u-haul trucks to collect the bodies of people who had died at home. Not all from Covid, but many from other ailments that in normal times might have been saved. The NYT article seems to suggest that all the excess deaths should be attributed to Covid (certainly the headline does), which I do NOT think is the right conclusion. However, with more time and further investigation into the cause of death of the excess death toll, the direct and indirect death toll of Covid will be known rather precisely. IF there were cases of fraudulent misclassification of cause of death, there is little doubt that the current DOJ will indict those before Election Day.

The conspiracy fallacies also point to ‘uncanny’ drops in accidental deaths from things like car accidents as proof of death certificate fraud, but between lockdowns, 20+ million unemployed and millions now working from home there are many fewer occasions for accidental deaths — so we would in-fact expect these numbers to decline. But this part of the conspiracy fallacy does bring up an important point that wasn’t brought up in the NYT article. The national excess deaths of 60,000 would be even higher if we considered that the expected non-Covid death rate should have declined due the drop in accidental and job related deaths. So their own cherry-picked analysis actually works against them in the big picture. Logically and scientifically it is now simply impossible to assert that Covid deaths are overstated, unless in a massive conspiracy of unprecedented scale over 200,000 people’s deaths have convincingly been staged by play actors. What about the 50% of Americans who have lost someone they know to Covid? I’m not sure how that fits into the conspiracy — but the Alex Jones types will find a way to tarnish their memory to preserve the fallacy.

I don’t expect that this or any other perspective will change the minds of those who still cling to the “Covid is an overhyped hoax” narrative, or some version thereof — especially since one of the sources I reference is the NYT. However, for people who actually care about data, and facts and their power to help us prepare for the future and save lives — data matters. Getting a better handle on both the direct Covid death toll and the indirect deaths due to local medical systems that were pushed beyond there limits will help us prepare for the next wave — and there will be a next wave.