During this pandemic, people in the United States are dying at rates unparalleled elsewhere in the world.
A new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that in the past five months, per capita deaths in the U.S., both from COVID-19 and other causes, have been far greater than in 18 other high-income countries.
“It’s shocking. It’s horrible,” says Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a professor of health policy and medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the study.
“The United States really has done remarkably badly compared to other countries,” he says. “I mean, remarkably badly.”
The study looks at per capita death rates in 2020 in 18 countries with populations larger than 5 million people and per capita gross domestic product levels above $25,000 per year. It breaks out deaths attributed to COVID-19 and examines how total deaths in the U.S. are higher than normal this year. This so-called “all-cause” mortality takes into account fatalities that may have been due to the coronavirus but were never confirmed or were due to other factors such as people not seeking medical care during the crisis.Article continues after sponsor message
Overall deaths in the United States this year are more than 85% higher than in places such as Germany, Israel and Denmark after adjusting for population size. Deaths in the U.S. are 29% higher than even in Sweden, “which ignored everything for so long,” Emanuel says. Sweden made a point of refusing to order strict social restrictions and never went in to a full lockdown. “We have 29% more mortality than we should have if we’d followed Sweden’s path and Sweden virtually did nothing.”
Even looking just at confirmed COVID-19 deaths, the number of people dying since May 10 — again after adjusting for population size — is on average 50% higher than every other country in the study. In addition, the rate people are dying in the U.S. has stayed far above everywhere else. Emanuel says the current elevated mortality rates are important because they eliminate the chaotic early months of the pandemic when testing, treatment and reporting varied dramatically around the globe.
The rate of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. since June 7 is 27.2 per 100,000 people. In contrast, in Italy, the death rate is down to 3.1 per 100,000.
“It’s not like Italy has some secret medicine that we don’t,” Emmanuel says. “They’ve got the same public health measures we’ve got. They just implemented them effectively and we implemented them poorly.” If the U.S. had managed to keep its per capita death rate at the level of Italy’s, 79,120 fewer Americans would have died.
This study is important for illustrating just how bad the death rate from COVID-19 has been in the U.S. compared with in other countries, says Theo Vos, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“The U.S. is in the company of a few other countries with very high rates of deaths assigned to COVID,” says Vos who was not involved in the study. “Only Belgium looks worse.” But he points out that once you look past the initial phase of the outbreak, the U.S. ends up looking worse than Belgium.
“Early on in the epidemic, many countries had a lack of testing possibilities. And a lot of deaths occurred early on where there was no formal diagnosis,” he says. “So Belgium decided ‘we’re going to count all of them.’ While in other countries like the Netherlands or the U.K. and the U.S. quite a few deaths have not been recognized as COVID.”
He says this is why looking at overall deaths since the start of the pandemic, not just official COVID-19 deaths, is important. On that measure, the U.S. is now consistently reporting roughly 25% more deaths than these other wealthy nations.
It didn’t have to be this way. If Trump had led his cult to adopt all the mitigation guidelines and not encouraged the Republican governors to throw all caution to the wind, this wouldn’t be this bad. It wouldn’t be nearly as bad. Instead he sent out tweets telling them to “Liberate” their states (leading to terrorist plots to kidnap their governors!) and now we have a pile of dead bodies that’s slated to grow much higher over the next few months.
And the man wants another four years. Unbelievable.
Oh, and by the way, this is what we have to look forward to if that happens:
The White House has embraced a declaration by a group of scientists arguing that authorities should allow the coronavirus to spread among young healthy people while protecting the elderly and the vulnerable — an approach that would rely on arriving at “herd immunity” through infections rather than a vaccine.
Many experts say “herd immunity” — the point at which a disease stops spreading because nearly everyone in a population has contracted it — is still very far-off. Leading experts have concluded, using different scientific methods, that about 85 to 90 percent of the American population is still susceptible to the coronavirus.
On a call convened Monday by the White House, two senior administration officials, both speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to give their names, cited an October 4 petition titled The Great Barrington Declaration, which argues against lockdowns and calls for a reopening of businesses and schools.
“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” the declaration states, adding, “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.”
The declaration has more than 9,000 signatories from all over the world, its website says, though most of the names are not public. The document grew out of a meeting hosted by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian-leaning research organization.
Its lead authors include Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an economist at Stanford University, the academic home of Dr. Scott Atlas, President Trump’s science adviser. Dr. Atlas has also espoused herd immunity.
The declaration’s architects include Sunetra Gupta and Gabriela Gomes, two scientists who have proposed that societies may achieve herd immunity when 10 to 20 percent of their populations have been infected with the virus, a position most epidemiologists disagree with.
Last month, at the request of The New York Times, three epidemiological teams calculated the percentage of the country that is infected. What they found runs strongly counter to the theory being promoted in influential circles that the United States has either already achieved herd immunity or is close to doing so, and that the pandemic is all but over. That conclusion would imply that businesses, schools and restaurants could safely reopen, and that masks and other distancing measures could be abandoned.
“The idea that herd immunity will happen at 10 or 20 percent is just nonsense,” said Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which produced the epidemic model frequently cited during White House news briefings as the epidemic hit hard in the spring.
We are talking about millions of people dead if they do this. They think that’s fine.