“The numbers are remarkable, and put to bed the idea that Covid-19 is akin to a bad flu season,” tweets John Burn-Murdoch, one of the authors of the Financial Times study. “You can clearly see that in almost every country, spikes in mortality are *far* higher than what we see from flu etc (grey lines are historical death numbers) .”
The publication compared novel coronavirus deaths reported to deaths from all causes in 14 countries. The authors tried to account for deaths missed in the pandemic because they occurred at home or were otherwise not confirmed by testing:
Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across these locations, considerably higher than the 77,000 official Covid-19 deaths reported for the same places and time periods.
If the same level of underreporting observed in these countries was happening worldwide, the global Covid-19 death toll would rise from the current official total of 201,000 to as high as 318,000.
To calculate excess deaths, the FT has compared deaths from all causes in the weeks of a location’s outbreak in March and April 2020 to the average for the same period between 2015 and 2019. The total of 122,000 amounts to a 50 per cent rise in overall mortality relative to the historical average for the locations studied.
Only Denmark did not show a significant spike. U.S. figures are not included.
The additional deaths might not all be attributable to COVID-19, authors acknowledge. But the excess deaths tend to occur in locations with the worst outbreaks, suggesting a direct correlation. This is particularly true in urban areas where reporting systems have been overwhelmed. Consider, for example, that in places with stay-at-home orders traffic and job-related deaths would be expected to go down.
Burn-Murdoch adds methodological details in his tweet thread not captured in the actual article.
Since these excess deaths are on top of expected flu season mortality, critics will focus on mortality from the coronavirus alone to argue the death rate from the pandemic itself is no worse. Or that the comparison is not to a particularly bad flu season. Or that these figures compare a disease with a vaccine to one without one, as if that matters to the dead and their families.
In short, those more focused on the health of the economy than on the pandemic’s human cost in lives will dismiss the charts as meaningless, ignore public health officials’ warnings, and argue for restarting the world’s money machines. That’s what Midas cultists do.
The Financial Times expects to team up with The Economist and the New York Times to expand its review in coming weeks.
Update: The Washington Post adds information on U.S. excess deaths. CNN reports 54,000 deaths in a month. Helluva job, Trumpie.
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.