
We May Be Underestimating the Coronavirus Death Toll - Willson50
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-01/coronavirus-italy-shows-we-may-be-underestimating-death-toll
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vanniv
We are both over and underestimating -- in that, we're counting deaths that
would have happened anyway as COVID deaths, and missing COVID-caused deaths as
well.

The net result is most likely an underestimate (as the article describes --
the situation in Northern Italy pretty much assures this must be the case, at
least there)

Examples of overestimate: So, the first COVID "caused" death in Pennsylvania
was a fellow in Allentown who fell and hit his head. He died of head trauma.
He had been diagnosed with COVID. He was counted as the first COVID death in
the state. There are certainly hundreds of cases like this, where someone died
with COVID but clearly not _from_ COVID.

On the other hand, the underestimate: Everywhere that is having COVID problems
is also having unseasonably high "pneumonia and influenza" death rates. (In
the U.S., for example, we're running about 0.5 above seasonal baseline (that
is to say, about 1 in 200 deaths "too many" are being caused by "pneumonia or
influenza") as of 2 weeks ago.

In Northern Italy, as the article points out, all-cause mortality suggests
that almost half of the COVID deaths are going recorded as non-COVID. This
will surely include COVID-influenced non-disease deaths (like someone who dies
of a car crash or heart attack that would have survived, except that the
healthcare system is swamped and they got no treatment -- apparently the
ambulance system is sufficiently overstretched that if you're over 85, the
ambulance just won't come for you at all) Those aren't COVID deaths, and they
aren't counted -- but they're deaths that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

It's all a tangled mess.

We're also definitely terribly underestimating the number of COVID cases. It
is certainly the fact that, in hard-hit areas, we're detecting less than 1
case in 3. Quite possibly worse even than 1 in 10. (but we won't know for sure
for a long time, if we ever do).

The WSJ article covering the same ground cited experts estimating the true
number of cases as anywhere from about 400,000 to 6,000,000.

