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by jprival 866 days ago
it’s been about 3x as bad as flu in January: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

edit: which is higher than some recent annual flu totals they have, but considerably lower than estimates of annual flu deaths I’ve seen elsewhere? I feel like I’m missing some context for interpreting these numbers.
2 comments
Macha 866 days ago
Measures to mitigate COVID are also effective (arguably more effective) on the flu. So the years where society was trying to stop COVID had much lower than usual flu rates.
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rsynnott 866 days ago
In many countries, including the US, death reporting is a bit of a mess. Those numbers will likely continue to tick up as numbers come in.

In Ireland, at one point in the pandemic, a lot of attention was paid to rip.ie, an obituaries website, because the non-hospital official death count was _months_ in arrears; the mechanisms around death reporting were just not designed for realtime analysis.

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jprival 866 days ago
I’m just used to seeing annual flu death counts that look more like this: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html. My first guess would be that it’s an issue of “confirmed” vs. “estimated” - and I’m sure actual covid-related deaths can similarly be estimated to exceed confirmed these days - but I don’t know exactly what the methodology is for each.
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rsynnott 865 days ago
Ah, yeah, these are estimated numbers. Estimated numbers aren't usually used for covid (or at least weren't during the pandemic; this may change); really everything was a bit too uncertain for decent estimates for the first year or so, and there would be political sensitivities to using an estimate as a headline figure.

For some sense of the scale, the WHO estimates 15 million deaths globally by end 2021, vs 5.5 million confirmed in the same period. But generally the WHO uses the confirmed figure; the estimate would rile up conspiracy theorists. I'd expect, given the situation in the US, that the CDC would be even more politically sensitive.

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jeffbee 865 days ago
CDC has always provided estimated excess deaths throughout the pandemic. They have correction factors for each jurisdiction by week, according to the typical delays in reporting.
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