Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by samcheng 2219 days ago
According to this New York Times article from the beginning of May, excess deaths in the United States outpaced official Coronavirus reporting by 33%. This obviously varies significantly by country. Certainly many more people are dying at home than previous years.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/05/us/coronaviru...

The key phrase if you want to learn more is "excess deaths"

1 comments

My understanding is that excess deaths statistic would also COVID deaths. You'd need to subtract COVID deaths from excess deaths. (and be certain that all COVID deaths are reported as such...)
Right - so ~25% of excess deaths in April in the United States were not directly caused by COVID-19, but were almost certainly indirectly caused by the virus, either via the 'medical care chilling effect' mentioned above, or through misattribution, or through other mechanisms like the increase in suicide.

This excess death mechanism has the potential to be very severe in very poor countries, where famine is likely to follow this plague. It's really quite sad.

Not really COVID deaths, you have to seperate them from the lockdown deaths.