Yeah, if you model New York with an appropriate epidemiological model using just mortality (which is more reliable than cases), the lockdown event is massive and trivial to detect. Anyone who claims otherwise is either dishonest or foolish.
One can pretty easily see the impact of COVID-19 there, even on countries that are not testing and therefore not reporting any cases...
Unfortunately I haven't been able to find that data for the US.
They include "deaths per day" in one of the charts. Early on I found their stats to be consistent with other trusted sources; but I've not confirmed that recently.
For countries that don't test, that number is zero. Quite the useless metric to report.
Much more meaningful would be: "(actual deaths/day) - (avg deaths/day of 2019)"
In the graphs right at the top of the page you can see several locations have more deaths than usual even if you subtract the covid19 ones. These are likely covid19 deaths that haven't been included in the stats, probably due to lack of testing.
According to that page, New York City, where almost 1 in 600 of the total population (not just of the infected) have died, is likely now tracking its stats pretty accurately.
Here's the EU version: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#excess-mortality
There's some lag in these figures. The CDC will have something eventually.
Can you detect the lockdown, which took effect at 8PM on Sunday, March 22?
The New York state governor announced the statewide lockdown on March 20 (to begin two days later, as indicated above). The statewide lockdown is not causally responsible for social distancing before then.
The same is true for the announcement of closing New York City public schools, which came on March 15. If private schools closed before then, the closure of public schools later cannot "take credit" for it.
This distinction is important for causal modeling, both of the past as well as the future, if/when orders from authorities are lifted. The effectiveness of the lockdown order is measured against a world without the lockdown order, which is still a world with a lot of social distancing.
Telling people "we recommend physically distancing and wearing masks" does not qualify as lockdown. I hope that I made that clear in my writeup.
Thanks for jumping in here, I think you made the point far better than I could have.
TLDR: We're undercounting deaths due to covid-19 by ~60% nationally, and 40% in NYC.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...
> TLDR: We're undercounting deaths due to covid-19 by ~60% nationally, and 40% in NYC.
What it does say is this:
> “Thus I would probably add about 15% or so to the known death toll,” she wrote to two city officials. “However — no city or state will be factoring this in or reporting it, so I don’t think we should either. We should just assume that the deaths are about 15% more than we can count, but not include them in official modeling, because we will never really know.”
It does pay some lip service to the notion that some of these at-home deaths could be precisely because of the "elective" (meaning, scheduled) surgeries that we had postponed.
Interestingly per the https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm, we see something like 647,000 heart disease deaths per year. So, I haven't done the napkin math, but could the 20%-odd spike of cardiac arrest events they mentioned have more to do with postponed surgeries?
I was off, Nationally were underreporting ~47%, NYC is at ~60%.
We can argue the pictures and stats in the Washington Post all day long. But either way, we're likely to be underreporting.
Also, though not directly due to the virus itself, the 'avoidable' deaths are kinda due to the pandemic and an over-response-ish factor.
This thing is going to take decades to sort out. Kinda like how people that die from digging up bombs from WW1 are counted in stats as WW1 collateral deaths, still.
I do agree however that it is very likely that the majority are.
> Also, though not directly due to the virus itself, the 'avoidable' deaths are kinda due to the pandemic and an over-response-ish factor.
Right, the distinction is if they would have occurred in an environment where we weren't locking down and suspending elective surgeries in places that weren't hard-hit. In a place like New York we should definitely assume that the capacity wasn't there until we have evidence otherwise though, so that would be a region where we certainly could not blame overreaction.
Thanks, I'll try to think about this more later on.
There's a few different numbers and it's important to keep them clear.
The main number that people know is "died after being tested positive with covid-19 from a covid-19 like illness". For a while this number only included people who died in hospital.
The next number (which the 40% to 60% refers to) is "died from a covid-19 related cause after testing positive, or after being suspected of being covid-19 positive". This includes all the frail people in nursing homes where tests were not carried out (they weren't being tested because it wasn't going to affect their treatment).
The 15% appears to refer to all the people who live alone at home.
> Interestingly per the https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm, we see something like 647,000 heart disease deaths per year. So, I haven't done the napkin math, but could the 20%-odd spike of cardiac arrest events they mentioned have more to do with postponed surgeries?
I agree that cancelled surgeries, and also people delaying seeking help when they start to have heart problems, is really worrying and has caused some of this excess death.