7 ms·

Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reported

64 points by enraged_camel 7y ago

jjtheblunt 7y 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 7y 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.
  - jjtheblunt 7y ago
    _Supposedly_ American hospitals are financially incentivized to count deaths as coronavirus if possible.
    - ska 7y ago
      Has there been any actual evidence of this? What is the mechanism by which they get paid this way?
      - notyourday 7y ago
        As the part of the CARES laws feds backstopped hospital expenses associated with COVID-19 treatment. As soon as the emergency was declared administrators knew at some point it would be paid.
        ska 7y ago
        Fair enough, but it's a long way from there to suggesting that there is intentional misclassification. Anything other than a general cynicism to back this?
    - nenadst 7y ago
      from the article : 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. so they are not counting only coronavirus related deaths but all
      - Drdrdrq 7y ago
        I would assume corona-side-effects (depression and domestic violence because of forced isolation, deaths from other causes due to lack of medical workers, stress, less healthy lifestyle, economic reasons,...?) to be a major factor too. It will be interesting to see if anyone has the courage to investigate all the causes of deaths when (if?) this madness is over.
- ska 7y 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.
  - AmericanChopper 7y 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-city-coronavirus-death-toll-jumps-revised-count https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/new-york-cit...
    - ska 7y ago
      I can't see how they are as likely, and already posited that they are possible. I didn't give a criteria that says everyone who has tested positive should be counted as a covid-related death. New York pretty clearly did the right thing here. There isn't going to be a coroners investigation, but with somewhere that large you have decent statistics on expected rates and attributing the up tick they saw was methodologically better than excluding those deaths. After all if I understand it correctly "suspected deaths" here is counting the otherwise unaccounted for increase over baseline statistics, not the baseline cases. That's the correct way to do this, and afiak it is how NY did it in reporting but I haven't double checked. It's not perfect, but that's life. Agree that this years flu analysis will be interesting, but on the overall statistics nobody competent is going to conflate them with covid-19, there may just be larger error bars.
- op03 7y 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.
mschuetz 7y 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 7y ago
  They have the charts in the article
  - mschuetz 7y 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 7y 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.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  The NYT has been doing this. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
  - pacala 7y 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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nraynaud 7y 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/ 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 7y ago
And it’s very likely that the infected count is an order or two magnitudes higher.
- DagAgren 7y ago
  This is not at all "very likely".
mrfusion 7y ago
I feel like I’m getting panic fatigue at this point.
- ImaCake 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
https://archive.md/Qlutx https://archive.md/Qlutx

64 points by enraged_camel 7y 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 7y 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.
- jjtheblunt 7y ago
  _Supposedly_ American hospitals are financially incentivized to count deaths as coronavirus if possible.
  - ska 7y ago
    Has there been any actual evidence of this? What is the mechanism by which they get paid this way?
    - notyourday 7y ago
      As the part of the CARES laws feds backstopped hospital expenses associated with COVID-19 treatment. As soon as the emergency was declared administrators knew at some point it would be paid.
      - ska 7y ago
        Fair enough, but it's a long way from there to suggesting that there is intentional misclassification. Anything other than a general cynicism to back this?
  - nenadst 7y ago
    from the article : 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. so they are not counting only coronavirus related deaths but all
    - Drdrdrq 7y ago
      I would assume corona-side-effects (depression and domestic violence because of forced isolation, deaths from other causes due to lack of medical workers, stress, less healthy lifestyle, economic reasons,...?) to be a major factor too. It will be interesting to see if anyone has the courage to investigate all the causes of deaths when (if?) this madness is over.
ska 7y 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.
- AmericanChopper 7y 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-city-coronavirus-death-toll-jumps-revised-count https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/new-york-cit...
  - ska 7y ago
    I can't see how they are as likely, and already posited that they are possible. I didn't give a criteria that says everyone who has tested positive should be counted as a covid-related death. New York pretty clearly did the right thing here. There isn't going to be a coroners investigation, but with somewhere that large you have decent statistics on expected rates and attributing the up tick they saw was methodologically better than excluding those deaths. After all if I understand it correctly "suspected deaths" here is counting the otherwise unaccounted for increase over baseline statistics, not the baseline cases. That's the correct way to do this, and afiak it is how NY did it in reporting but I haven't double checked. It's not perfect, but that's life. Agree that this years flu analysis will be interesting, but on the overall statistics nobody competent is going to conflate them with covid-19, there may just be larger error bars.
op03 7y 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.

mschuetz 7y 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 7y ago
They have the charts in the article
- mschuetz 7y 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 7y 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.
ceejayoz 7y ago
The NYT has been doing this. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
- pacala 7y 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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

nraynaud 7y 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/ 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 7y ago

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

DagAgren 7y ago
This is not at all "very likely".

mrfusion 7y ago

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

ImaCake 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago

https://archive.md/Qlutx https://archive.md/Qlutx