The national media are on the verge of commemorating the one millionth COVID death in the US. By the NYT's count, we're now at 998,325. But the truth is we crossed the million-American mark months ago.
There are two main reasons we've been under-counting:
One is political. It looks bad for governors when their states have more COVID deaths than neighbors, so they subtly pressure officials to decide gray-area cases in favor of listing anything besides COVID as the cause of death, to lower their totals. That's especially true in places that pursued laissez-faire policies and needed numbers to justify that.
Two is that even with the best of intentions, it's very hard to account for delayed COVID deaths. For example, you catch COVID, get really sick, then recover, but the period of extended inflammation left permanent damage in your circulatory system. Six months later, you drop dead of a heart attack. Is it a COVID death? No, it won't be listed that way, because it's impossible to prove COVID caused it, or even contributed, in any individual case. All we can say is that STATISTICALLY those who had COVID are dying of heart attacks at higher rates.
That's where "excess death" figures are so helpful. We know what mortality rates looked like in the US before COVID. For years before the pandemic started, the CDC was able to predict with impressive accuracy how many Americans would die, using a pretty simple method of projecting average mortality rates forward. Year after year, their projections were within three percentage points, plus or minus, the actual mortality. For 2017-2019, they predicated 8,551,767 would die, and the actual figure was 8,502,695 -- a "miss" of only 0.57%.
So, using that same method, we can compare how many the CDC projected would die during the pandemic-period, based only on prior-year averages, and how many actually died. From the last week of March 2020, when COVID first started causing a lot of death here, to the last week of March 2022, the CDC had projected 5,965,299 deaths. 7,062,826 people actually died. So, we're talking about nearly 1.2 million COVID deaths in the US, already. We passed the 1 million mark in late January.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
There are two main reasons we've been under-counting:
One is political. It looks bad for governors when their states have more COVID deaths than neighbors, so they subtly pressure officials to decide gray-area cases in favor of listing anything besides COVID as the cause of death, to lower their totals. That's especially true in places that pursued laissez-faire policies and needed numbers to justify that.
Two is that even with the best of intentions, it's very hard to account for delayed COVID deaths. For example, you catch COVID, get really sick, then recover, but the period of extended inflammation left permanent damage in your circulatory system. Six months later, you drop dead of a heart attack. Is it a COVID death? No, it won't be listed that way, because it's impossible to prove COVID caused it, or even contributed, in any individual case. All we can say is that STATISTICALLY those who had COVID are dying of heart attacks at higher rates.
That's where "excess death" figures are so helpful. We know what mortality rates looked like in the US before COVID. For years before the pandemic started, the CDC was able to predict with impressive accuracy how many Americans would die, using a pretty simple method of projecting average mortality rates forward. Year after year, their projections were within three percentage points, plus or minus, the actual mortality. For 2017-2019, they predicated 8,551,767 would die, and the actual figure was 8,502,695 -- a "miss" of only 0.57%.
So, using that same method, we can compare how many the CDC projected would die during the pandemic-period, based only on prior-year averages, and how many actually died. From the last week of March 2020, when COVID first started causing a lot of death here, to the last week of March 2022, the CDC had projected 5,965,299 deaths. 7,062,826 people actually died. So, we're talking about nearly 1.2 million COVID deaths in the US, already. We passed the 1 million mark in late January.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm