The real death toll from the pandemic in America may already be 300,000

https://www.vox.com/2020/10/21/21526304/real-death-toll-coronavirus-300000-cdc

By Julia Belluz

Oct 21, 2020, 10:10am EDT

The official Covid-19 mortality figures might be dramatically underestimating the real death toll of the pandemic in the US, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

From late January to early October, nearly 300,000 “excess deaths” occurred in America, the report authors estimate. That’s about a third more than the 216,025 coronavirus deaths the US reported in the same period.

Excess mortality is a figure that simply calculates how many more people died, of any cause, in a given period and place than what would be typically expected based on past years. It’s important to track during a pandemic because official death counts may not capture undiagnosed fatal infections, or those who died of causes indirectly related to the virus, such as interruptions in health care. (We know of a few such interruptions already: people experiencing heart attacks have been forgoing emergency room visits, and drop-offs in cancer screenings.)

To come to these estimates, the CDC authors looked at weekly death rates by age group and ethnicity this year, and compared those to historical averages for 2015 through 2019.

According to the report, 66 percent of the estimated 299,028 excess deaths could be attributed to Covid-19, while the remaining third were linked to other causes — such as misclassified Covid-19 deaths, or deaths from “disruptions in health care access or utilization.”

Young people experienced the greatest relative increase in excess deaths

The most attention-grabbing finding relates to the pandemic’s toll on young people: For 25- to 44-year-olds, the excess death rate is up 27 percent. That’s the largest percentage increase of any age group.

“Historically, increases in death rates like this are rare among young people,” said Sam Harper, a population health researcher at McGill University, “especially across all population groups simultaneously.” 

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