Nicholas Kristof--America's True Covid Toll Already Exceeds 100,000

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/opinion/coronavirus-us-deaths.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Many supporters of President Trump believe that the figures for coronavirus fatalities are inflated, and Trump himself shared a tweet doubting the accuracy of some virus figures.

He’s right that the death toll seems off — but not in the direction he would suggest. We’ve crunched the numbers, state by state, and it appears that somewhere around 100,000 to 110,000 Americans have already died as a result of the pandemic, rather than the 83,000 whose deaths have been attributed to the disease, Covid-19.

That’s my estimate reached with the help of a Harvard statistician, Rafael Irizarry, based on a comparison of death rates this spring with those in previous years. Some states have been largely unaffected — death rates in some even appear to have dropped, perhaps because of less driving and fewer car accidents — but others have seen huge surges in deaths.

Over all, in a bit more than two months, the United States lost more Americans to the coronavirus than died over seven decades in the Korean, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.

For those who can't get beyond the firewall---Part of the problem is that the cause of death is often uncertain--no autopsy, no covid test---so some estimates have to be made. For the 7 weeks ending April 25, there were 70,000 more deaths than normal for the season, and that excludes Conn., NC and Penn., due to incomplete data for those states. The official covid numbers for that time were 49,100, leaving at least 20,000 excess for that time. Add that to the 83,000 as of now and we are already over the 100,000 mark. States with the most meticulous testing have smaller numbers of unexplained deaths.
There is also anecdotal evidence that there is an undercount--doctors in the early stages often listed the death as respiratory failure instead of covid and this is reported in the article. They will also tell you this is a global problem, not just an American one--estimates go as high as twice the official count.
This form of re-evaluating is why the first official death toll from Hurricane Maria's strike on Puerto Rico in 2017 was only 64 but has been revised up to 2,975.
And to finish with one more quote:

Given the uncertainty and the lags in data, why go through this exercise of estimating deaths? Because flawed numbers based on an undercount are already a central part of the discussion, informing policy decisions, and Trump has made them so.

“We have saved thousands and thousands of lives,” he said on May 1. “Hopefully, we are going to come in below that 100,000 lives lost.” In that context, it seems worthwhile to note that this milestone has already been exceeded.

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1. This I believe . ..

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3. Kick for late morning crowd