Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Monday, May 11, 2020

The hardest data

There is always a certain amount of slop in attribution of causes of death. Actually those annual influenza death rates that are talked about so much are estimates, because in ordinary times most people with respiratory infections aren't lab tested to confirm the pathogen. Death certificates might just say pneumonia. But enough tests are done to be able to extrapolate. Covid-19 is different in that people who present at the hospital with serious symptoms are tested, so a much higher proportion of deaths are laboratory confirmed. However, some states are only reporting laboratory confirmed deaths, and people who die at home are not usually tested and many of those deaths don't make it into the official counts. That's why every real expert believes the officially reported death toll is an underestimate. So here's what we know for sure.



This is just the count of death certificates, it isn't looking at the diagnosis. But obviously  something has caused the death rate in New Jersey to suddenly shoot up to more than twice the norm for the past 4 years. This has happened with the severe restrictions the state put in place in March.

And it's not just deaths we should be worried about. It is now clear that many people, even those who don't have very severe disease in the first place, face extremely prolonged, debilitating convalescence and in many cases permanent organ damage. This disease is very nasty, even though most people who are exposed don't get severely sick, for unknown reasons.

It is indeed very painful that people with low and moderate incomes, who generally don't have significant savings, have been put out of work, and disproportionately so. As I have said many times, as I said in this space last week, we need to balance the costs of shutting down businesses against the hazard of not doing so, and we need to move responsibly to get people back to work. But just declaring "open for business" is a) not going to get people back to work because either customers will stay away because they are rightfully anxious, or they'll show up and there will be new outbreaks and the businesses will have to shut down again and b) it is precisely those low wage workers who will be most at risk. Note that outbreaks in meatpacking plants, Walmarts, and other businesses where low-paid workers are forced to congregate indoors. The only reason we haven't seen these in bars and restaurants is because they have been closed.

Yes this has forced a lot of people into food and housing insecurity. But sometimes bad things happen and it can't be helped. This would not have happened to us in the first place if we had a president who is not an insane idiot and an otherwise competent administration. We could have ended up like South Korea or New Zealand, and been okay. But now we're stuck with it. More on that later.

4 comments:

Mark P said...

I just saw on the news that NYC may have undercounted by as many as 5000 deaths. That's a significant fraction of the total deaths in the US to date. And the number reported as recovered (219,000) seems pretty low compared to the number of cases reported (1.38M). What do you think about that?

Don Quixote said...

Thank you for stating the objective truth--and it's so sad that it is not an opinion, but the truth--that the president of the United States is an insane idiot.

Watching this insane idiot today get vitriolically sarcastic and racist with a Chinese-American female reporter at the White House briefing--before he stormed off in a huff--was disgusting.

Donald J. Trump is a disgusting human being. He is, spiritually and ethically and morally, a piece of rank, filthy rat shit. There is no punishment that he does not deserve; 73 years old is old enough to have to take responsibility for being a complete failure as a human.

I hope the corrupt members of the Supreme Court will rule against him in the suit that comes before them today, in which he claims absolute immunity as president from having to answer a subpoena for his finances and tax returns. His dream: to be immune from everything, from responsibility, from raping women, from paying for abortions, from being a pathologically lying narcissist, from killing citizens of the U.S.

He needs to be exposed for the complete fraud and hateful person that he is. And when it comes to COVID-19, well, he simply needs to be exposed. He's not immune from anything.

Cervantes said...

I'm not sure how the "recovered" box gets checked. I suspect that in many cases people who test positive but are not hospitalized don't get retested and are never counted as recovered. On the other hand some people who are hospitalized and eventually discharged with the requisite two negative tests are probably counted as recovered although they are, as we have seen, still suffering debilitating symptoms. I wouldn't pay much attention to that number.

Cervantes said...

Yep. If you go to the Covid-19 tracking project you will see that the "recovered" category is unavailable for many states. They seem to be a bit behind other trackers in total deaths for some reason, but they do give a more detailed breakdown of state-by-state data than is available elsewhere. They seem to have a conservative approach.