The daily new case count continues extremely slow decline. More of a drift than a trend. In any case, U.S. now stands at 28 new cases per 100K population per day, down one from yesterday.
Hospitalizations are at about 5500 per day. Deaths are just below 400 per day.
Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts: Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 8/24/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
A little death math.
This next section began with the notion that maybe the current COVID-19 deaths are deaths that would likely have happened anyway. COVID-19 deaths are now shifting toward the oldest old, and the site of death is moving toward places typically associated with frail elderly at the end of life — nursing home, hospice, and home. I went over all that in Post #1570.
Source: U.S. CDC, available at this link.
To me, that suggests that maybe there aren’t that many years of life being lost to these most recent COVID-19 deaths. That is, maybe these current COVID deaths are mainly individuals who likely would have died of something else, relatively soon. And so, maybe these current COVID-19 deaths aren’t really additional deaths. COVID just happened to be the proximate infection that pushed these frail elderly decedents beyond their limits. E.g., if had hadn’t been COVID, it likely would have been bout of pnemonia, soon enough.
Well, that seems to be totally incorrect. Not only do the COVID-19 deaths seem to be additional — not substituting for some other cause of death — but the overall U.S. mortality rate remains elevated far above recent historical levels.
When the U.S. death rate rose sharply in 2020, due to COVID-19 deaths, that made a lot of headlines. For sure, 2020 saw the single largest drop in U.S. life expectancy for the past half-century. It was, I think, the largest one-year drop in U.S. life expectancy since literally the 1918 flu pandemic.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) system.
Oddly, I can’t recall anything about the 2021 death rate. I know that CDC takes an almost unbelievably long time to publish the final data on deaths for a year. But, as it turns out, their preliminary data came out in the spring.
Unknown to me, 2021 was even worse than 2020. Compared to 2020, the number of deaths in the U.S. rose, and the U.S. age-adjusted mortality rate increased a further 0.7 percent.
Source: Adapted from CDC “Provisional Mortality Data, United States, 2021”.
It seems that in 2021, COVID-19 made-up what it lacked in per-case dealiness through the sheer volume of cases. As the graph below clearly shows, COVID-19 added to the existing mortality burden, through the end of 2021. For that time period, the notion that COVID-19 might just be displacing other causes of death in the frail elderly is clearly nonsense. If anything, deaths from other causes appear to increase slightly by the end of 2021.
Source: Adapted from CDC “Provisional Mortality Data, United States, 2021”.
Maybe this got some press coverage, but I surely don’t recall it. And it will be months yet before CDC does its final estimates, including life expectancy. U.S. life expectancy fell further in 2021, on top of the 2020 decline. And that’s primarily due to COVID-19 deaths.
But that’s so five minutes ago. We’re over COVID-19 now. So how much has the U.S. mortality rate dropped in 2022, compared to prior years? Surely by now we’re nearly back to normal.
Nope.
Source: Episphere mortality tracker. Notations are mine. Underlying data are CDC weekly provision death counts.
In conclusion, this analysis revealed three things that I didn’t realize before.
- 2021 was even worse than 2020 for COVID deaths and overall U.S. mortality.
- 2022 has not yet seen a return to “normal”, that is, to the average levels of mortality seen in the 2015-2019 period.
- COVID deaths remain “additional” deaths, they are not somehow substituting for other routine causes of death in the frail elderly.
