The pandemic's true death toll (The Economist)

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates

No paywall
https://archive.ph/c9XO4


How many people have died because of the covid-19 pandemic? The answer depends both on the data available, and on how you define “because”. Many people who die while infected with SARS-CoV-2 are never tested for it, and do not enter the official totals. Conversely, some people whose deaths have been attributed to covid-19 had other ailments that might have ended their lives on a similar timeframe anyway. And what about people who died of preventable causes during the pandemic, because hospitals full of covid-19 patients could not treat them? If such cases count, they must be offset by deaths that did not occur but would have in normal times, such as those caused by flu or air pollution.

Rather than trying to distinguish between types of deaths, The Economist’s approach is to count all of them. The standard method of tracking changes in total mortality is “excess deaths”. This number is the gap between how many people died in a given region during a given time period, regardless of cause, and how many deaths would have been expected if a particular circumstance (such as a natural disaster or disease outbreak) had not occurred. Although the official number of deaths caused by covid-19 is now 5m, our single best estimate is that the actual toll is 16.8m people. We find that there is a 95% chance that the true value lies between 10.3m and 19.5m additional deaths.

The reason that we can provide only a rough estimate, with a wide range of surrounding uncertainty, is that calculating excess deaths for the entire world is complex and imprecise. Including statistics released by sub-national units like provinces or cities, among the world’s 156 countries with at least 1m people we managed to obtain data on total mortality from just 84. Some of these places update their figures regularly; others have published them only once.

To fill in these voids in our understanding of the pandemic, The Economist has built a machine-learning model, which estimates excess deaths for every country on every day since the pandemic began. It is based both on official excess-mortality data and on more than 100 other statistical indicators. Our final tallies use governments’ official excess-death numbers whenever and wherever they are available, and the model’s estimates in all other cases. You can read our methodology here, and inspect all our code, data, and models here.

*snip*

[SoCalDavidS]

1. It Could Be 9 Million

The average Right Wing Asshole couldn't care less whether it's 700K or 920K.

[Demovictory9]

2. Anti vaxxers say the opposite..that covid deaths arent.covid deaths