EXCLUSIVE: "Non-COVID" Excess Death Rates Ran 21x Higher In Reddest Counties Than Bluest In 2021

[LetMyPeopleVote]

Link to tweet

https://acasignups.net/22/05/09/exclusive-non-covid-excess-death-rates-ran-21x-higher-reddest-counties-bluest-2021

However, there's one other important factor which I haven't delved into...because I never had access to the data, at least not at the county level: Excess deaths. For this, I've enlisted the assistance of Andrew Stokes, Asst. Professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, to the point that I'm giving him co-author credit for this entry.

As many others have noted, the actual COVID death toll, both here in the United States and around the world, is almost certainly considerably higher than the official numbers which have been reported.

Globally, the World Health Organization just released a new report stating that nearly 15 million more people have died since the COVID pandemic hit two years ago than normally would have...compared to the official COVID death toll of around six million.

In some cases, the cause of death wasn't COVID-19 itself, but something indirectly connected. For instance, if someone had a heart attack but couldn't get to the hospital on time because all of the ambulances were filled with COVID patients, and so forth.

In other cases, the cause of death was COVID-19 but was misdiagnosed as something else. Often this was an honest misdiagnosis, especially in the earliest days of the pandemic before accurate testing was available and some hospitals/labs even knew what to look for.

Link to tweet

[LetMyPeopleVote]

1. Excess all-cause mortality across counties in the United States, March 2020 to December 2021

Link to tweet

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.23.22274192v2

ABSTRACT
Official Covid-19 death tallies have underestimated the mortality impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. Excess mortality, which compares observed deaths to deaths expected in the absence of the pandemic, is a useful measure for assessing the total effect of the pandemic on mortality levels. In the present study, we produce county-level estimates of excess mortality for 3,127 counties between March 2020 and December 2021. We fit two hierarchical linear models to county-level death rates from January 2015 to December 2019 and predict expected deaths for each month during the pandemic. We compare these estimates with the observed numbers of deaths to obtain excess deaths for each county-month. An estimated 936,911 excess deaths occurred during 2020 and 2021, of which 171,168 were not assigned to Covid-19 on death certificates. Urban counties in the Far West, Great Lakes, Mideast, and New England experienced a substantial urban mortality disadvantage in 2020, whereas rural counties in these regions had higher mortality in 2021. In the Southeast, Southwest, Rocky Mountain, and Plains regions, there was a rural mortality disadvantage in 2020, which was exacerbated in 2021. The proportion of excess deaths assigned to Covid-19 was lower in 2020 (76.3%) than in 2021 (87.0%), suggesting fewer Covid-19 deaths went unassigned later in the pandemic. However, in rural areas and in the Southeast and Southwest a large share of excess deaths were still not assigned to Covid-19 during 2021.

SIGNIFICANCE Deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic have been primarily monitored through death certificates containing reference to Covid-19. This approach has missed more than 170,000 deaths related to the pandemic between 2020 and 2021. While the ascertainment of Covid-19 deaths improved during 2021, the full effects of the pandemic still remained obscured in some regions. County-level estimates of excess mortality are useful for studying geographic inequities in the mortality burden associated with the pandemic and identifying specific regions where the full mortality burden was significantly underreported (i.e. Southeast). They can also be used to inform resource allocation decisions at the federal and state levels and encourage uptake of preventive measures in communities with low vaccine uptake.

[in2herbs]

2. Too bad dead Rs are still allowed to vote! /s/ nt

[Johnny2X2X]

3. Their leaders lied about deaths

In red states and counties, they cooked the numbers to downplay the dangers of the virus. Millions here died.

[Girard442]

4. Yup. Also, there were stories about family members pressuring authorities...

...to misreport the true cause of death. Embarrassing when Uncle Elwood who went around saying, "The blood of Jesus is the only vaccine I need." died of COVID.

[CrackityJones75]

6. My field is barren.