Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reported

https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac846c

by enraged_camel • 6 years ago

64 44 6 years ago

jjtheblunt2• 6 years ago

I wonder what will be the accepted count months from now.

I say that from the media-frustrated view of an American within America, who regularly reads German and Scandinavian news online (and UK too) just for external perspective.

I reflexively think two two things: (1) title sensationalism possible, and (2) or it could be far lower than reported, but that's not sensational, and only time will tell.

234523452536456• 6 years ago

The first sentence is:

The death toll from coronavirus may be almost 60 per cent higher than reported in official counts, according to an FT analysis of overall fatalities during the pandemic in 14 countries.

The article is about reported deaths, not predicted. I doubt many countries are reporting artificially high counts.

jjtheblunt2• 6 years ago

_Supposedly_ American hospitals are financially incentivized to count deaths as coronavirus if possible.

ska7• 6 years ago

This isn't about models, this is about actual reported deaths.

Systemic undercounts can happen easily in a situation like this; for example if you are only reporting as Covid-19 deaths people who a) died in a hospital and b) had a positive test. This will undercount if you are not testing broadly enough (or the test isn't accurate) or people are dying outside the hospital in unusually high rates due to the virus. NYC is a good example of where it's pretty clear this was happening (and they have adjusted their counts upward).

Fatalities is one area with overcounts are quite unlikely, but could be happening in some places I suppose, and will have to be accounted for if it can be demonstrated.

AmericanChopper4• 6 years ago

Overcounts are just as likely. Well incorrectly attributed deaths at least.

Somebody who tests positive, and then dies in a car accident meets your above criteria. For something less contrived, so does somebody who tests positive, and then subsequently dies of an unrelated heart disease.

If you wanted to fix attribution, you’d need a coroner’s investigation into each death, which certainly isn’t happening. Even testing every death that you want to count isn’t feasible, because of test shortages and the potential for false negatives. A real world example of that is in New York, where a revision in their attribution methodology had their numbers jump up massively in one day [0]. What changed was they decided to add all deaths where Covid was a suspected cause to the count.

Whether these shortcomings in methodology would lead to an overall overcount is probably unlikely. But methodology differences from one place to the next does make it difficult to compare statistics. With some factors applying downward pressure to the stats, and other factors applying upward pressure.

One thing I’m going to be interested in looking up when this is all over is 2020s influenza deaths. I have a strong suspicion that 2020 is going to have record low flu deaths, with many of them being incorrectly attributed to Covid-19.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/new-york-cit...

op03• 6 years ago

Whatever the National count ends up being, NYC for example will contribute much more to it, than some county in the Midwest.

So naturally people get cheesed off. One side has been hit hard, another hasn't and both get grouped together to produce some arbit number.

Rather than counting country wise what would make more sense is global hotspot comparisons(town/city level).

The hotspots will see a lot of Excess Deaths over historic mortality rates I have no doubt.

mschuetz2• 6 years ago

What I'd be interested in are some graphs that compare deaths of January, February, March and April for 2018, 2019 and 2020. To see the expected trend from 2018/19 and the reality of 2020.

jhwang5• 6 years ago

They have the charts in the article

mschuetz2• 6 years ago

Ah thanks, I've got the bad habit of not opening articles anymore since most of them prevent ad blockers or demand tracking rights with obnoxious page filling popups, nowadays.

tjr225• 6 years ago

Still, I wish you could see specific years vs this year. For instance there were fewer deaths in Michigan in March of 2020 than in 2019, but I'm sure that would be different if you averaged it over the course of four years.

ceejayoz2• 6 years ago

The NYT has been doing this.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

pacala3• 6 years ago

... in a sensationalist manner.

If you scroll down low enough, you stumble upon per country multi-year comparisons. Notice how for Sweden, Switzerland, France or England the spike is not much higher than the seasonal 2017 flu.

Moreover the peak of the 2017 flu is cut out of the graph for France and England, as a couple weeks before/after new years are cut out from the graph for aesthetic[?!] reasons. For a publication that wants to be taken seriously, cutting out the most relevant comparison point is embarrassing.

And, of course, no breakdown by age.

vanniv• 6 years ago

Those are the graphs we really need.

Especially when you consider things like the dramatic drop in reported mortality from things like heart disease the last few months according to the preliminary data.

But preliminary data isn't very good quality ever, so it is hard to tell how much of that is just bad data, how much is coronavirus killing people that were going to die in only weeks anyway, and how much is misreporting.

But in six months or so, when the data start to settle down, we will find out which direction we are miscounting in. (Clearly we are miscounting in both directions by significant amounts, but it's hard to tell the comparative magnitude)

ceejayoz2• 6 years ago

Unless you think deaths are going to go to zero next month, we can put the "is coronavirus killing people that were going to die in only weeks anyway" theory to bed. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

nraynaud• 6 years ago

What is weird is that those figure were always reported in a lot of countries, including 24 countries of Europe with https://www.euromomo.eu/ .

I live in France where the statistics service does an accelerated counting since the beginning of the pandemic to publish a partial count of the death certificates faster than usual. It is published every week with the number of people diagnosed, and deaths in hospitals, etc.

qeternity• 6 years ago

And it’s very likely that the infected count is an order or two magnitudes higher.

DagAgren• 6 years ago

This is not at all "very likely".

mrfusion• 6 years ago

I feel like I’m getting panic fatigue at this point.

ImaCake• 6 years ago

Maybe time to block social media sites in your hosts.txt file and router, and then switch to reading some books in your free time.

Good luck, if it helps, a lot of people are feeling the same way.

gremlinsinc• 6 years ago

I've been obsessed w/ r/coronavirus and panicking for weeks, I'm starting to feel disassociated from it, like I know it's real but part of me thinks "don't worry, won't happen to me".

Part of that is that I'm in rural utah and we have 40 cases in a huge 3-4 county area w/ 100k+ people. It's not like I'm in NY where I can hear the sirens all day. I'm also getting tired of frozen food and home-cooked dinners. We do order delivery or drive-thru 1-2 times per week, but I'm always paranoid when I do but I feel I'm getting more 'comfortable' and less paranoid, which could bite me in the ass as I'm higher risk (obesity, 40, sleep apnea).

probably part of it is also the longer days make it go so much slower, and even my introverted self wants to get out of the house and do something besides this all day everyday for the next year.

neonate• 6 years ago

https://archive.md/Qlutx

Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reported

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