US deaths in 2020 top 3M, by far most ever counted

https://apnews.com/article/us-coronavirus-deaths-top-3-million-e2bc856b6ec45563b84ee2e87ae8d5e7

by tempsy • 6 years ago

96 114 6 years ago

This statistic puts an end to the debate about COVID death reporting.

Some said that COVID deaths inflated due to federal subsidies to hospitals with COVID patients.

Some said that deaths would have occurred anyway due to the serious medical conditions - co-morbidities - that patients had.

With this statistic, the explanation for the huge annual increase can only be COVID.

macintux6• 6 years ago

You're far more optimistic than I am. People can find many ways to mold statistics to fit their beliefs (or simply reject the numbers as a deep state conspiracy).

This debate will never be over.

chii• 6 years ago

it's not a debate if they refuse to look at evidence in a scientific and neutral light. Instead, it's a propaganda fight.

codysc• 6 years ago

While I agree with your points about the clear indication of covid deaths, unfortunately this will have no impact on the debate.

Facts aren't super relevant anymore.

sangli• 6 years ago

Heh! Facts are always relevant when you are debating in good faith. People who find facts not supporting their beliefs argue dishonesty that doesn't mean facts are not relevant.

ultrarunner2• 6 years ago

Facts aren't super relevant anymore.

This is so interesting to me. Facts are still important to those seeking truth. Sure, there are a lot of people seeking reassurance ahead of truth, but there are also simply a lot of people. Given that people now have more ability to make their opinions widely known, I suspect that truth and facts are just as relevant as ever, but that loud noises will be made by those who won't be doing anything relevant about it either way.

Our ability to judge the relative value of messages is proportional to our ability to reason about the sheer number of people with things to say. I think that wrapping one's mind around the enormity of 330 million people may be valuable towards honing in on not only what messages are important, but what movements simply aren't.

ravenstine2• 6 years ago

While I agree in a sense, it doesn't seem useful that people keep pointing out how facts don't matter. Not only is it debatable whether they ever were relevant, but I've heard this sort of phrase used too often in a way that is dismissive. No one even replied that COVID isn't real, or whatever nonsense, but you're already arguing against some nameless side of the COVID debate.

The pandemic, like everything else, must have its costs weighed against benefits, even if it involves people dying; for that reason alone, whether or not people think the pandemic restrictions are justified, the debate should be ongoing. It should never be considered a settled issue because the facts often come out long after it has passed. I'd be concerned if everyone agreed on anything in unison.

ravenstine2• 6 years ago

You're speaking as if this article gives us certainty that the 400,000 extra deaths this year, compared to last year, are due to COVID. The article makes no such claim. Maybe that's not what you meant, though, because clearly there are things like drug overdoses, suicides, domestic violence, etc., that can also explain a lot of it as well. Tens of thousands of people die of fentanyl overdoses each year, and the number was growing up to this point, so it's not farfetched to consider that the COVID restrictions have resulted in more people taking addictive drugs or killing themselves out of desperation.

macintux6• 6 years ago

The article makes no such claim.

The article claims 318k COVID deaths.

COVID-19 has killed more than 318,000 Americans and counting. Before it came along, there was reason to be hopeful about U.S. death trends.

The numbers also don't highlight the number of unnecessary deaths and suffering because hospitals are overwhelmed.

(Edited to include the specific statement I'm refuting.)

davycro• 6 years ago

I’ve worked in four emergency departments in three states this year. All of them have been overwhelmed by patients with covid, and not patients with overdoses, suicides, or domestic violence. Granted the incidence of those non-covid pathologies are likely higher this year, but they are no-way elevated at the scale of covid-19. I haven’t seen, or heard from any colleagues, hospitals brimming with suicides and overdoses to the point where they are filling an entire icu with those patients, or having so many domestic violence cases that they have to shut down operating rooms and convert them into icu beds.

mdoms3• 6 years ago

Dude. Come on.

ntsplnkv2• 6 years ago

Half this country didn't care about drug addicts before. Now all of a sudden people care about drug addicts. They don't care though when it comes to cutting social programs or health care reform.

People didn't care when Wal-Mart decimated mainstreet and Amazon killed who was left. Now people are all about small business.

Sick of the hypocrisy. It's sad we can't take care of our own people in this country.

fairity2• 6 years ago

I've heard this argument many times over. While it's certainly plausible, I've yet to see real statistics supporting the claim that there's been a significant rise in suicides / drug overdoses during the pandemic.

After doing some research on 2020 suicide rates, the only legitimate source I found suggested there was a decrease in suicide rate towards the beginning of the pandemic due to a "honeymoon pulling together" phase and no peer-reviewed data thereafter.

Source: https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352

brlewis4• 6 years ago

can also explain a lot of it as well

What do you mean by "a lot"? There are statistics here if you want to dig in more:

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-counts-of-death-by-jurisdic...

CryptoPunk2• 6 years ago

There were other factors that differed in 2020 compared to other years, like the effects of the lockdowns: mass-bankrupties [1], social isolation for the elderly [2], an increase in drug-overdoses, a decline in access to quality-of-life enhancing services, etc.

Isolation in general is extremely deadly. [3]

My guess is that the effects of COVID on the US's 2020 mortality rate were much greater than the effects of the lockdown, but that is just a guess, not a scientifically validated conclusion.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/sm...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hidden-covid-19-health-...

[3] https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/dangers-of-loneliness-s...

HuwytNashi_004• 6 years ago

The devil's advocate could point out how trivial it would be to fudge these numbers. "Government releases data showing government is benevolent. Trust government."

Better yet, he might point out how absurd it is that we need to wait this long to identify a potentially statistically significant increase in deaths... during one of the worst pandemics in recorded history.

macintux6• 6 years ago

Government releases data showing government is benevolent. Trust government.

Don't these numbers show government is incompetent?

And the overall increase has been pretty clear for a while now.

matz17• 6 years ago

With this statistic, the explanation for the huge annual increase can only be COVID.

Do you really think that the lockdown and its effect (the bankruptcy, unemployment, reduced social activity, delayed treatment of other illness, etc) could not cause increase in death ?

fairity2• 6 years ago

Not sure why you're downvoted. Your question is valid. That said, I've yet to find solid evidence that supports a substantial rise in suicide rates. The only source I found suggested the opposite: https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352

thebruce87m• 6 years ago

There are countries on the list here: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ that had lockdowns but have no significant excess mortality, so it’s at least possible.

just-juan-post• 6 years ago

Murder + Suicide counted as Covid 19

https://www.skyhinews.com/news/coroner-state-included-a-murd...

Man with 0.55 blood alcohol level (not a typo) counted as a Covid death

https://durangoherald.com/articles/324539

FlyMoreRockets• 6 years ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513489

MattGaiser4• 6 years ago

These are the same. Your link brings me back here.

supernova87a• 6 years ago

Human beings (or maybe America right now) are good, or used to be good, at attacking threats that are:

-- large and concentrated

-- sudden

-- unusual, uncommon

-- gruesome

Not so good at threats that are:

-- everyday, slow

-- small, but distributed

-- mundane, familiar

I guess COVID found our Achilles heel.

MattGaiser4• 6 years ago

Or just anything that is not an equal opportunity killer. Everyone can be killed by a terrorist. Plenty of people believe COVID is no threat to them.

AnHonestComment• 6 years ago

And they’d be right:

Someone over 70 is 270x as likely to die of COVID as someone under 50. For anyone under 50 without co-morbidity, then this is just a yearly flu — and destroying your economic future over the flu doesn’t make sense.

Having a blanket policy that ignores those differences is unrealistic.

IFR numbers are from the CDC’s best estimate:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

matz17• 6 years ago

Plenty of people believe COVID is no threat to them

That is true, if you are under 70 and reasonably healthy, the chance of seriously sick from covid is very very low.

calvinmorrison• 6 years ago

More like -

Everyone can be killed by COVID, everyone can be killed by terrorists.

However it is unlikely your dunkin donuts in farmville, North Dakota is going to be the target of the latest ISIS attack.

Likewise your likelihood of dying of COVID is not equal to others. If you believe it is - you have been duped.

mdoms3• 6 years ago

I just don't think this is true as a generalization. It may be true of American culture today, but it doesn't follow from even the past 50 years of broader human innovation against death. Consider the number of lives saved from:

- antibiotics

- seatbelts and other automotive innovations

- CFC rules

- anti smoking legislation

- etc...

natmaka4• 6 years ago

A reciprocal view is that all sci/tech advances which led to those saved lives has also led to urbanization (=> vastly accrued need for antibiotics), automobile (=> need for seatbelts and other automotive innovations)...

We may (or may not) be "more something" (for example "more happy", "more self-accomplished"...) thanks to all those advances.

cactus2093• 6 years ago

Automotive deaths are another example of a failure, not success. Something like 40,000 deaths a year still. Add guns to the list as well. Covid isn’t the first mass killer we just kind of learn to live with and ignore.

maxerickson3• 6 years ago

I think a lot of the problem is that it isn't familiar. People use intuitive reasoning, they don't see disease and death, it must not be a problem. But it spreads so fast that it's dangerous long before you see it (because it quickly gets to the point of being uncontrollable).

MattGaiser4• 6 years ago

This too. Or just people's perceptions of "overwhelmed." I know people who don't think hospitals are having issues because "nobody is spilling out the door, so they still have room in hallways."

They went to a local hospital and looked through the window to make this judgement, as if the resource constraint was physical space in the building.

netsec_burn• 6 years ago

Grammer seems to be another Achilles heel.

christophilus• 6 years ago

Grammer and speling.

ARandomerDude2• 6 years ago

Whew! He's only got two heels, so we're in the clear now!

sneak• 6 years ago

It has a name:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

PurpleFoxy• 6 years ago

*some humans

The majority of developed countries run by half competent leaders is taking this threat very seriously.

EricE2• 6 years ago

What threat? There is zero context to this "increase"; Did population stay the same, grow or shrink for this year? That gives entirely different context to this raw number.

throwaway2011032• 6 years ago

Some of this is COVID, no doubt. Most of those deaths are people in their last decade (if not last few years) of life regardless. We had a baby boom in the 1950s. So we should be too surprised to have a death boom starting right about now.

onecommentman• 6 years ago

A QALY-based analysis would provide a different historical perspective.

https://www.healthguideinfo.com/health-informatics/p6185/

I haven’t seen a QALY-based analysis of the fatality data. Odd, because our State is reporting underlying condition stats and age (by decade) and gender of death daily. Pretty easy to take expected years of life remaining, and quality of life given age and underlying conditions and estimate and come up with an estimate to first order of the “quality life years” lost due to COVID.

No one seems to be providing such a QALY estimate.

So, let’s do a quick one.

For 1917, the comparison year, let’s assume excess deaths were from combat and the Spanish Flu.

Combat skews young. So, say, 50 quality years per death.

I don’t see any age-specific bias or bias towards underlying conditions one way or another in Spanish Flu cases given this information. And a lot of cases of healthy adults dying, e.g. Australian miners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

So let’s say 30 quality years lost per death.

COVID skews old.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...

The median age of COVID death in my county has been in the late 70s

Life expectancy tables for US suggest ten years of life remaining for folks in their late 70s. I’ve seen statistics that find degraded quality of life in the last 3 or 4 years of life.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-09-healthy-lifestyle-age...

Even without underlying conditions, that puts quality life years lost at 8. Underlying conditions predisposing to COVID death will only make it look worse, driving the 8 down to 7 or 6.

So, for 1917, 50 years lost in combat combined with 30 quality years lost to the “Spanish Flu”...IDK, let’s say 40 years lost per death.

For 2020, COVID excess deaths...6-8 quality years lost.

Even after quibbling with numbers, the quality years of life lost are a factor of 5 higher in 1917 as compared to 2020. Based on this, admittedly rough, “analysis”. (You get what you pay for.)

I really would like to see a formal QALY analysis of COVID, instead of the ones that many people have already done in their heads.

stkdump• 6 years ago

What about people that didn't die this year, but experienced a high degradation of life quality? What about people that experienced a 'low quality' year this year, being in ICUs for weeks?

A scientific analysis about years of life lost was done for COVID fatalities. It was in the press about half a year ago. It was a little over 10 years on average, even considering the preexisting conditions.

slaw• 6 years ago

Linked article says in Sweden for COVID-19 you count QALY in months not years. 'The observed temporary excess mortality likely arises because people in vulnerable groups die weeks or months earlier than they would otherwise, due to the timing and severity of the unusual external event.'

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v...

tinalumfoil3• 6 years ago

Wouldn't we generally expect any given year is the deadliest year on record? If we assume (1) the population strictly increases year on year and (2) deaths are proportional to population in a given year, then it would be true. Weaken these assumptions and it should still be true for the most part.

MattGaiser4• 6 years ago

The key part is the "by far."

The article addresses this in the first few paragraphs:

U.S. deaths increase most years, so some annual rise in fatalities is expected. But the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15%, and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted.
That would mark the largest single-year percentage leap since 1918, when tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died in World War I and hundreds of thousands of Americans died in a flu pandemic. Deaths rose 46% that year, compared with 1917.

khuey• 6 years ago

And "Deaths usually rise by about 20,000 to 50,000 each year, mainly due to the nation’s aging, and growing, population."

tinalumfoil3• 6 years ago

It walks back the significance of the title a bit, but that's different than addressing it. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I would expect far larger number of souls to die from one year to the next even if nothing significant occurred.

twblalock3• 6 years ago

3.2 million (the number from the article) is is 400k more than last year.

The latest Covid toll in the NYT tracker is 322,839, and all of those deaths were in 2020. So, there is a gap of 77-78k.

Obviously there could be some conceivable increase in other kinds of death for unrelated reasons, but not that much.

will_pseudonym3• 6 years ago

That also would be reflecting a significant (assumed-- possibly non-existent--see twblalock's reply below) reduction in the number of car crash fatalities we'd normally have if lockdowns weren't going on (There were 38,800 total in the US in 2019 [0]).

But data seems to be showing increased deaths due to overdoses & suicides due to those lockdowns, so it's hard to tell.

Synthetic opioids (primarily illicitly manufactured fentanyl) appear to be the primary driver of the increases in overdose deaths, increasing 38.4 percent from the 12-month period leading up to June 2019 compared with the 12-month period leading up to May 2020. [1]
Compared to the last three years (2017-2019), the number of suicide deaths was lower than average during the initial phase of the pandemic but, starting in July 2020, exceeded the past trend. The source of the increase was mainly female suicides, whose numbers increased by approximately 70% in October 2020. Suicides by young women (less than 40 years of age) almost doubled in October, with a 95.58% increase, compared to the same month in the past three years. The number of suicides among students was also notably higher in August and September 2020 than the corresponding numbers of past years. Our survey data indicated that the status of mental health among young women has been deteriorating in recent months, and also that young female workers were more likely than any other group to have experienced a job or income loss, suggesting adverse economic conditions surrounding some of these individuals. [2]

[0] https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatality-estim...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-death...

[2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2020/12/05/202...

tinalumfoil3• 6 years ago

If you want to know if the impact of COVID you could look at a metric like excess mortality which there's pretty good data on, then compare the excess to the total mortality. Usually it's calculated so that any excess deaths is pretty rare which is what makes it a good metric.

With year on year increase in deaths I'm not sure I could convince myself it was significant unless I had a chart and a calculator in front of me. A year over year death increase, even a large one, seems like it would occur pretty often. Even a large increase in the increase doesn't sound like it would be significant -- wouldn't that be pretty sensitive to the shape of the population relative to age? And I'm not sure what that looks like off the top of my head. There's a lot to adjust for, and you need to be sure you're not just rolling dice at the end with the numbers.

My point is it's not really a good metric. There's plenty of reasons why it would jump around, and I'm not smart enough to adjust for all the necessary variables in my head. It's not obvious how much we should expect it to jump around. But maybe others here just know their US demographic data better than me.

jobigoud• 6 years ago

So, there is a gap of 77-78k.

The parent was asking about the normal increase of death count year over year. This can explains about half of that gap.

ARandomerDude2• 6 years ago

This isn't a figure I normally track, so I looked it up to get a relative sense of scale during a "normal" year. The CDC says it was 2,839,205 in the USA for 2018.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm

Retric• 6 years ago

In case people are skipping the article. preliminary numbers suggest that the United States is on track to see more than 3.2 million deaths this year, or at least 400,000 more than in 2019.

refulgentis• 6 years ago

Thanks, took a pass at it for 3 minutes and still couldn't parse numbers out from anywhere.

greenbush• 6 years ago

.. which is about 14% more deaths in 2020.

samspenc• 6 years ago

Were the numbers consistent before this year (2020)? That would help indicate what the variance / increase this year was compared to the past, say, 5-10 years or so.

leereeves• 6 years ago

With a population of 330 million and an average life expectancy of about 80 years, we can expect that number to keep climbing. We'd average over 4 million deaths per year maintaining a stable population with the current life expectancy.

chromaton• 6 years ago

Will we see a "rebound" in 2021 with fewer deaths than usual?

twblalock3• 6 years ago

Probably we will see more than usual, from other causes that benefit from early detection such as cancer. People avoiding hospitals during the pandemic is probably going to have a bit of an aftereffect.

brlewis4• 6 years ago

I don't know about 2021, but at some point we'll see fewer deaths. Lots of people who would otherwise have died in that future year are dying this year.

radioactivist• 6 years ago

If you're already 75 years old your life expectancy is roughly another 10 years (COVID deaths skew to the 70+ age bracket). So I'd expect the "deficit" in deaths to be spread out over at least 5-10 years. This might not be easily resolvable above typical year to year background fluctuations.

EricE2• 6 years ago

I'm sure deaths increasing has nothing to do with population increasing either.

I just so love raw numbers without context /s

US deaths in 2020 top 3M, by far most ever counted

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