Counting Covid Deaths Without Testing

I hear around the far right (Breitbart, Redstate) the claim that NYC and NY are "inflating" the death count, for some nefarious reason (different motives are given). And this was before NYC realized a lot of extra people were dying at home and updated their death count to include probable Covid deaths. Of course the far right saw this as a further attempt by NYC to "inflate" the death count (as if people are just dying in NY instead of all over the country).

Here's what you do to get a good count of Covid deaths without testing: You create a baseline of average deaths-per-day for this time of year for the last several years. Adjust it a bit for population. Say, on a given April 19th, for the past five years, an average of 145 people die on that day (that's about how many people die a day in NYC). And today there were 845, 745 of whom died of Covid-like illness. Was Coronavirus responsible?

Hmmm... of course it was. What else would it be? An extra 700 deaths from the flu day after day? Come on. It's not that hard. Gobs of people are dying who shouldn't be, and they're dying of a respiratory illness and a pandemic is raging out of control that attacks your respiratory system.

Gee, what could all these extra deaths be caused by?

 

Good point. If it later turns out that the number of regular flu deaths went down during the covid pandemic, Breitbart will claim liberal conspiracy to fudge the numbers to make Trump look bad.

In real life, the flu death rate is expected to go down, because flu transmission is also slowed by social distancing. But, that won't matter to them, they'll have their political cheap shots ready to keep the minions in line, and clicking on the RW trash links.

 

While you do have a point that social distancing would naturally slow down the transmission of the flu, it does need to be tempered with the reality that the flu starts in October, and it peaks from December to February. This means that when social distancing began in mid March, the overwhelming majority of flu cases would have already occurred, which probably renders your point as being almost statistically insignificant, or at most a very tiny statistical impact.

 

Don't forget additional suicide and domestic violence from people losing their liberty. All the extra deaths could be caused by those.