Let's be honest

The death toll from coronavirus is probably double what has been reported. Yes, double.  We’ve blown away the projections the president likes to latch onto.  We know he is a liar; we know he is incompetent; why should we expect anything different about this?

In the NYT today

How reported coronavirus deaths compare with deaths above normal

Numbers are from March 8 to April 11, 2020.

If deaths in all states average 100% or higher than the usual rate over the past 5 years, that means our coronavirus death toll is probably over 120,000 people.

The Times story discusses the reasons for the delays in reporting all deaths and the delays in testing.  The story also discusses how at the same time, traffic accident death rates have dropped. It uses Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico as an example of how death rate can be reevaluated and rise over time.

In Puerto Rico in 2017, only 64 deaths were initially attributed to Hurricane Maria. But an analysis of the additional deaths showed the way that the disaster had, directly and indirectly, led to nearly 3,000 deaths over six months. The total included the immediate deaths from mudslides and drownings, but also sepsis, diabetes and suicides that came later as the power failure stretched on for months.

Coronavirus is clearly killing more U.S. residents directly than any hurricane has, but it is also changing lives in ways that may also contribute indirectly to increased deaths — by overloading the health care system and discouraging people from seeking care.

Where yesterday, the news story was we have exceeded the death toll from the Vietnam War, the reality is, we have more than doubled that death toll — that’s what I take from these numbers.

And when you look at the global pandemic, the numbers get more grim.

Around the world, the coronavirus is bringing large waves of mortality. In Spain, deaths over the last month are 66 percent higher than normal, according to New York Times reporting. In Ecuador, they are more than 80 percent higher than normal. In Paris, more than twice as many people are dying every day as normal — far more than during a typical bad flu season.

The story concludes that we will have more clarity on the accounting of deaths as time goes on.  But I am a data driven person.  Without the full accounting based on these numbers, Covid-19 directly and indirectly combined is causing the deaths of approximately double the numbers we have reported for the US at this time.

We need to have a national mourning for all those we have lost and will continue to lose over the course of this pandemic.  We need to have leadership that shows empathy and compassion as we seek the path forward. 

And yet I feel like we are stuck with Beavis and Butthead running the country, with Trump talking about injecting disinfectants and Pence insisting he doesn’t need to wear a mask when visiting a hospital.

Talk about the perfect storm.  Over the last three years, I have said, we have been fortunate that Trump has not had to deal with any major crisis….and I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Boy, did it come down with a resounding thud. 

When all the accounting is done, and this country in fact does have a higher death rate than Europe or other parts of the world, I think we can conclude that Trump and Pence exacerbated the death toll of coronavirus by their handling of the crisis as well as with their policies, weakening air quality standards, penalizing blue states, weakening the healthcare system, and taking away people’s health insurance.  They will own this. And that will be written in history.

I expect this will come. But for now, we will mourn those we have lost.

Elections matter.