By Emma Brown, Andrew Ba Tran and Reis Thebault
Washington Post, May 2 at 4:15 PM
The United States recorded an estimated 37,100 excess deaths as the novel coronavirus spread across the country in March and the first two weeks of April, nearly 13,500 more than are now attributed to covid-19 for that same period, according to an analysis of federal data conducted for The Washington Post by a research team led by the Yale School of Public Health.
The Yale team’s analysis suggests that the number of excess deaths accelerated as the pandemic took hold. There were 16,600 estimated excess deaths just in the week of April 5 to April 11, compared with 20,500 over the prior five weeks.
Though the team’s estimate of the impact early in the outbreak already paints a picture of unusually high mortality, the number is certain to grow as more deaths are reported to the federal government on a rolling basis.
“I think people need to be aware that the data they’re seeing on deaths is very incomplete,” said Dan Weinberger, a Yale professor of epidemiology who led the analysis for The Post.
Those excess deaths — the number beyond what would normally be expected for that time of year — are not necessarily attributable directly to covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. They could include people with unrelated maladies who avoided hospitals for fear of being exposed or who couldn’t get the care they needed from overwhelmed health systems, as well as some number of deaths that are part of the ordinary variation in the death rate. The number is affected by increases or decreases in other categories of deaths, such as traffic fatalities and homicides.
But excess deaths are a starting point for scientists to assess the overall impact of the pandemic.
Don’t miss stories like this Click for EP Blog updates
The nation surpassed 64,000 coronavirus deaths on Friday, according to The Post’s compilation of state health department data. Weinberger said his team’s estimates of excess deaths indicate that the pandemic’s true toll to date is likely substantially higher.
“It’s hard to say how much higher, but our best guess might be it’s in the range of one and a half times higher,” he said.
The analysis is based on death certificate data that states compile and send to the National Center for Health Statistics, a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It often takes weeks for a death to be counted in these federal numbers, so tallies for the most recent weeks are provisional and inevitably missing many deaths. As time passes and more information becomes available, NCHS backfills data for those weeks — and the death totals grow.
Read the full story
EnviroPolitics Blog is working to keep you informed about all aspects of the coronavirus — the status of confirmed cases, disease spread, death toll–and also how Americans are coping. Like this story, for instance. If you like what we are doing,
Click to receive free updates and please tell your friends about us.
