Thursday, April 16, 2020

Thoughts on deaths from COVID-19 in the US (on numbers, not uplifting)

The IHME (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) projections of total deaths in the United States, which many people are using to try to figure out how many people will die from COVID-19, seems like it needs to be updated. I just checked out the projection for New York state.

Currently, according to Worldometer, 16,106 people in New York State have died of the virus. https://ncov2019.live/ gives the same figure. 

The IHME projection for deaths in New York State, through August 4, 2020, is 14,542 (with a large area of uncertainty ranging between 11,000 and 23,000 deaths. It has the current death total at about 10,000 (from April 12), even though New York has reported a much higher level of deaths than that today. (See the screenshot below). It seems to me that they need to update their estimate for New York.


Currently, in Massachusetts, 1,245 people have died of COVID-19 - this includes some deaths in nursing homes, but not all of them, it seems. (This is also true of New York, even though New York City has just added thousands of people to the death toll who hadn't been originally counted). This is slightly below the IHME projection for this day (April 16). The total projection of deaths for Massachusetts is 8,219 by August 4, 2020. The per day death projection does seem closer for Massachusetts than for New York State.


The IHME projection for total deaths in the United States by August 4 also seems low to me. 


This chart shows 20,461 deaths as of April 11. The figures from that date from Worldometer, https://ncov2019.live/, and Johns Hopkins University are about 22,000 deaths. Their projection is for 29,902 deaths today (April 16), but the current figures are 34,475 (Worldometer and https://ncov2019.live), which incorporates many more deaths reported from New York (especially NYC) than was earlier reported. 

I think that because there are still probably many deaths not being reported, the actual number of people who have died from coronavirus is a good deal higher than we know now, and therefore the estimate given by IHME is really quite misleading. Like everyone else, I don't know how many people will die of the virus by August 4, 2020, nor can I predict the future about whether the infection and death rates will go down or up from now on. 

Some relevant articles on how the numbers of deaths are probably too low:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/fdny-sees-huge-uptick-in-doa-ambulance-cases-as-covid-ravages-city (information from the Fire Department of New York City about home deaths that haven't been reported in the COVID statistics)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/nyregion/new-york-coronavirus-death-count.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/nyregion/new-york-coronavirus-deaths.html (addition of 3778 deaths to the total number in New York City).

And this article is about the count of excess deaths in several cities in northern Italy, in the heart of the pandemic there: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/this-is-very-important-from-italy-please-read
Posted by at

1 comment:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)