U.S. reports 66,000 more deaths than expected so far this year

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/us-reports-66000-more-deaths-than-expected-so-far-this-year/2020/04/29/b6833548-8a68-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html

By Lenny Bernstein
April 29, 2020 at 9:20 p.m. EDT


The United States has suffered at least 66,000 more deaths than expected this year, a toll that includes the devastation directly caused by the coronavirus pandemic and a sharp rise in fatalities not attributed to the virus, the government reported late Wednesday.

The new report from the National Center for Health Statistics shows 33,756 covid-19 deaths and 32,325 from all other causes since Jan. 1. Other causes include heart attacks, accidents, overdoses, cancer and a wide variety of other fatal diseases. It also could include people who died of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, at home but whose deaths were incorrectly attributed to another cause.

The numbers are almost certainly a substantial undercount of the actual total. The report notes that information on the cause of deaths can take as long as eight weeks to reach the federal government and be tallied.

On Wednesday, the death toll from the coronavirus alone passed 60,000 since Feb. 29, according to data collected by The Washington Post.

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The numbers paint a statistical portrait of the national devastation of the past 120 days. There have been more than 17,000 excess deaths in New York City alone, 10,000 more in New York state and nearly 8,000 in New Jersey. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia and Massachusetts all suffered more than 2,000 excess deaths.

West Virginia, which has reported just 40 coronavirus deaths, nevertheless has suffered 2,182 excess deaths so far this year, according to the new data. California has experienced just 807. At the bottom of the list, Hawaii and Nevada have seen 12 each.

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