They will then be able to assess which interventions worked best, to inform future pandemic responses. Eventually, demographers and public-health researchers will have enough granular information from death certificates to do this. There are more sophisticated ways to categorize mortality to find out how many people were killed as a direct result of infection with SARS-CoV-2, and how many deaths happened because of other factors associated with the pandemic. How deadly is the coronavirus? Scientists are close to an answer According to data from more than 30 countries for which estimates of excess deaths are available (see ‘Terrible toll’), there were nearly 600,000 more deaths than would normally be predicted in these nations for the period between the onset of the pandemic and the end of July (413,041 of those were officially attributed to COVID-19). It can help epidemiologists to draw comparisons between countries, and, because it can be calculated quickly, it can identify COVID-19 hotspots that would otherwise have gone undetected. It’s a comparison of expected deaths with ones that actually happened, and, to many scientists, it’s the most robust way to gauge the impact of the pandemic. In times of upheaval - wars, natural disasters, outbreaks of disease - researchers need to tally deaths rapidly, and usually turn to a blunt but reliable metric: excess mortality. “I just remember thinking, ‘this is going to be really difficult to explain to people’,” he recalls.Īnd in March and April, when national statistics offices began to release tallies of the number of deaths, it confirmed his suspicions: the pandemic was killing a lot more people than the COVID-19 figures alone would suggest. If that can happen with a well-known disease, there were bound to be deaths from COVID-19 going unreported, thought Noymer, a demographer at the University of California, Irvine. Even in a normal winter, some deaths caused by influenza get misclassified as pneumonia. He was watching countries across Europe and North America begin to record their first deaths from COVID-19, and he knew there could be problems with the data. Carmel Wroth edited this story.At the beginning of March, Andrew Noymer felt a familiar twinge of doubt. Sean McMinn and Audrey Carlsen contributed to this story. Elena Renken was a co-author on that version. This story was originally published on March 16, 2020. The JHU team maintains a list of such changes. Figures shown do not include cases on cruise ships.įluctuations in the numbers may happen as health authorities review old cases and or update their methodologies. There may be discrepancies between what you see here and what you see on your local health department's website. State-by-state recovery data are unavailable at this time. This may result in occasional data discrepancies on this page as the JHU team resolves anomalies and updates its feeds. The JHU team automates its data uploads and regularly checks them for anomalies. The graphics on this page pull from data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University from several sources, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the World Health Organization national, state and local government health departments 1point3acres and local media reports.
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