
A new way to accurately estimate Covid-19 death toll - samizdis
https://phys.org/news/2020-04-accurately-covid-death-toll.html
======
necovek
It's amazing how often death toll related to COVID-19 is taken in a vacuum.
From all the little evidence we get
([https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/well/live/coronavirus-
doc...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/well/live/coronavirus-doctors-
hospitals-emergency-care-heart-attack-stroke.html)), it seems that heart
disease related deaths are reduced, or rather "swallowed" by the coronavirus
deaths (in US alone, 650k people die of heart-related diseases every year, or
more than 50k a month).

To me, the explanation is logical — some who would have died of a heart
disease anyway are now dying of COVID19.

I do not want to dispute that it is having an effect — I just want to know
what that effect is. Is it 20% more deaths? Or 4x (300%) more?

Considering heart related diseases have been mostly linked to COVID19 deaths,
I am surprised nobody is looking at aggregated data yet, which would help more
"accurately" estimate the death toll.

~~~
necovek
FWIW, I look at US data as a good proxy for what happens if you do not
institute a full lockdown or strict social distancing rules only for the first
full month with roughly 50k deaths. Assuming there was no decrease in heart-
related deaths (up to 55k), that suggests that the effect is at worst 100%
increase (doubling).

I suspect that it's lower than that since there's bound to be an overlap, but
that's still a big range (though it can also be negative since at-risk
patients might get early care due to the panic, but that would be surprising).

------
samizdis
> "... there was high confidence (99 percent) the expected [US] death toll
> would be between 66,055 and 70,304."

~~~
gus_massa
Nah. There are so many possible unknown events, like patient 31 in Korea, if
people will go to the beach when there is a sunny day, if people will crow in
front of the banks in case of a bank run [1], when will the class start, will
planes keep flying, ...

Note that the paper says:

> _The new model predicts that the maximum total number of deaths will be
> approximately 62,100 across the United States due to the Covid-19 virus, and
> with a 95% confidence that the expected total death toll will be between
> 60,951 and 63,249 deaths based on the data until 22 April, 2020._

When the intervals calculated with a high confidence at different day don't
overlap, it's a huge red flag.

For a more realistic interval, the paper also says:

> _On 17 April, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics
> Evaluation (IHME) projected that there would be 60,308 Covid-19 deaths with
> an estimated range between 34,063 and 140,381 deaths by 4 August, which is
> down from 68,841 as predicted earlier on 13 April._

[1] we have something like this in Argentina, not a bank run, but something
similar.

