Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reported

You’re saying almost certainly, but you’re demonstrably making a lot of assumptions. For instance studies of the effect recessions have on mortality rates vary wildly, from having a positive effect (like the Great Depression), to having a hugely negative effect (Brazil 2012-2016). There’s other obvious confounding factors in this approach too. What is the impact on mortality rate in moving primary care to Tele-conferencing? The pandemic had prioritized Covid care, and stretched medical resources. What impact has that had on the mortality rate of non-Covid conditions? The answers to those questions are not obvious, and have not been rigorously studied. Even if you could answer them, that approach would imply redefining the Covid-19 death toll from being “deaths caused by Covid-19” to “deaths which may not have otherwise happened, during that particular period, if not for Covid-19”.

I’m not disagreeing with you that their are confounding factors in both directions, this is clearly true.

I’m disagreeing that at this moment - and with statistics like excess mortality in NYC, there is very good reason to believe that upward and downward pressure are not equally likely.

As to the first assumption I disagree . We have pretty good ideas of all causes rates in somewhere like NYC, we have pretty good numbers on things like accidents etc. And then sort of factors you point out like the effect of a recession aren’t on effect yet for the most part. So you have a bunch of excess morbidity, and you have pretty good local statistics in the gaps, at least locally. You are right that this doesn’t go apples to apples in other places but we aren’t doing that so it does matter.

There is one kind of interesting wrinkle, you may have stress related impacts that show up even on a short timeline. So there is a question if you can/should attribute those and you can pick reasonable ways, either choice .

Flu isn’t likely going to be confounded too badly because people are going to be focussing in the counfounding impacts (e.g. of isolation). It just seems strange to me to assume this will be a problem , some people involved are good at this sort of analysis . Much more likely that a decent job will be done and the estimation errors will have wider bounds.

I guess I just don’t see any data to support your pessimism , on that , but I could be wrong of course. I mean this sort of modelling isn’t easy but it is doable.

Fair enough, but it's a long way from there to suggesting that there is intentional misclassification. Anything other than a general cynicism to back this?

> Note on interpretation of data: The number of deaths shown for the three most recent weeks should be interpreted with caution, as adjustments for delayed registrations may be imprecise. Furthermore, results of pooled analyses may vary depending on countries included in the weekly analyses. Pooled analyses are adjusted for variation between the included countries and for differences in the local delay in reporting.

Ad. "So we've got 1k extra deaths per week for a few weeks at a population of 200M+ people, the end is nigh?!"

There is a question about long term health of people who got COVID-19. Based on Japanese study on Grand Princess passengers [0] and some 6 divers [1] all with mild cases from Germany around 50 to 80% of people seem to have damage to the lungs visible on CT scans after mild symptomatic or even asymptomatic infection. Two of the divers had significant oxygen deficiency when doing physical exercise after 5-6 weeks of recovery. The guess of the doctor who was inspecting them is that this is permanent damage that may take years to recover if ever.

Also, the virus didn't go away - it's still there. Depending on location 0-20% of people got infected with median probably around 1%. In places where 20% got infected the virus killed significant portions of the whole population. In Bergamo province of Italy with little bit over 1 million population and 4000 deaths the virus killed around ~0.4% of the whole population or close to 1 in 200 people. It's very unlikely that there will be any mass events in Europe this year or next year before we get vaccines. Any indoors events involving more than 100 people - especially involving talking, dancing, singing or mourning are also very unlikely.

Ad. PS. They updated their website recently. This is how it looked like before - they were reporting z-scores only and only as a picture. https://twitter.com/Isinlor/status/1249252918609526784 I count the new website as a big step up :) .

Ad. PS2. Somebody would need to write scraping script from the website. Also: > While the network fully supports data sharing, the network hub is not mandated by the participating countries to release any national data. If you are interested in exploring the possibility to access national data, please approach countries individually.

[0] https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/ryct.2020200110

[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

Eyeballing the graphs, this looks consistent with a story that 10% of cases are at 0-1. (But I'm bad at eyeballing, so do let me know if the data says otherwise!)

This is what I read about the Great Smog in London. People tried to explain away deaths by saying all the people that died would have died in a few months anyways. But not supported by death records.