Objectives. To determine the number of excess deaths (i.e., those exceeding historical trends after accounting for COVID-19 deaths) occurring in Florida during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods. Using seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average time-series modeling and historical mortality trends in Florida, we forecasted monthly deaths from January to September of 2020 in the absence of the pandemic. We compared estimated deaths with monthly recorded total deaths (i.e., all deaths regardless of cause) during the COVID-19 pandemic and deaths only from COVID-19 to measure excess deaths in Florida.
Results. Our results suggest that Florida experienced 19 241 (15.5%) excess deaths above historical trends from March to September 2020, including 14 317 COVID-19 deaths and an additional 4924 all-cause, excluding COVID-19, deaths in that period.
Conclusions. Total deaths are significantly higher than historical trends in Florida even when accounting for COVID-19–related deaths. The impact of COVID-19 on mortality is significantly greater than the official COVID-19 data suggest.
Author(s): Moosa Tatar, Amir Habibdoust, Fernando A. Wilson
Publication Date: 10 March 2021
Publication Site: American Journal of Public Health
The impact of the pandemic in Florida “is significantly greater than the official COVID-19 data suggest,” the researchers wrote. They came to that conclusion by comparing the number of estimated deaths for a six-month period in 2020, from March to September, to the actual number of deaths that occurred, a figure known as “excess deaths” because they exceed the estimate.
There were 400,000 excess deaths across the United States in 2020, a spike closely correlated to the coronavirus pandemic.
The lack of testing early in the pandemic may also have undercounted COVID-19 deaths, explains Daniel Weinberger, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health who has also studied the coronavirus and excess deaths.
The issue was further complicated because each state has its own death-counting methodology. “Some states classify a death as due to COVID if a positive molecular test was obtained, while other states allow the death to be classified as due to COVID if there is a suspicion that it was caused by COVID (even without a molecular test),” Weinberger wrote in an email to Yahoo News.
On May 8, 2020, Peru’s Ministry of Health approved ivermectin (IVM) for the treatment of COVID-19. A drug of Nobel Prize-honored distinction, IVM has been safely distributed in 3.7 billion doses worldwide since 1987. It has exhibited major, statistically significant reductions in case mortality and severity in 11 clinical trials for COVID-19, three with randomized controls. The indicated biological mechanism of IVM is the same as that of antiviral antibodies generated by vaccines—binding to SARS-CoV-2 viral spike protein, blocking viral attachment to host cells.
Mass distributions of IVM for COVID-19 treatments, inpatient and outpatient, were conducted in different timeframes with local autonomy in the 25 states (departamentos) of Peru. These treatments were conducted early in the pandemic’s first wave in 24 states, in some cases beginning even a few weeks before the May 8 national authorization, but delayed four months in Lima. Analysis was performed using Peruvian public health data for all-cause deaths and for COVID-19 case fatalities, as independently tracked for ages 60 and above. These daily figures were retrieved and analyzed by state. Case incidence data were not analyzed due to variations in testing methods and other confounding factors. These clinical data associated with IVM treatments beginning in different time periods, April through August 2020, in each of 25 Peruvian states, spanning an area equivalent to that from Denmark to Italy and Greece in Europe or from north to south along the US, with a total population of 33 million, provided a rich source for analysis.
For the 24 states with early IVM treatment (and Lima), excess deaths dropped 59% (25%) at +30 days and 75% (25%) at +45 days after day of peak deaths. Case fatalities likewise dropped sharply in all states but Lima, yet six indices of Google-tracked community mobility rose over the same period. For nine states having mass distributions of IVM in a short timeframe through a national program, Mega-Operación Tayta (MOT), excess deaths at +30 days dropped by a population-weighted mean of 74%, each drop beginning within 11 day after MOT start. Extraneous causes of mortality reductions were ruled out. These sharp major reductions in COVID-19 mortality following IVM treatment thus occurred in each of Peru’s states, with such especially sharp reductions in close time conjunction with IVM treatments in each of the nine states of operation MOT. Its safety well established even at high doses, IVM is a compelling option for immediate, large scale national deployments as an interim measure and complement to pandemic control through vaccinations.
Author(s): Juan J Chamie-Quintero, Jennifer Hibberd, David Scheim
I review national-level U.S. mortality data from 2020 into 2021 (last updated 3/17/2021, weekly data through the week ending 3/6/2021), using the CDC’s own dashboards.
Breakdown by total numbers, states, age group, racial/ethnic group, non-COVID major causes.
Far from the cable studios, happily, researchers are seeking a more serious understanding of the pandemic’s toll. One study finds that those who died of Covid-19 lost on average 9.3 years of life, equal to the remaining life expectancy of a 78-year-old.
The highest-cost deaths, it follows, were likely those not directly caused by the illness. In separate studies, U.S. government and Virginia Commonwealth University researchers say a third of “excess deaths” might fall into this category — delayed medical care, unemployment stress, substance abuse, suicide, depression, etc. One study looked at the effect of unemployment and predicted 30,231 additional deaths over a 12-month period.
What does this mean? Suppose half of these were unrecognized Covid deaths. Even so, the remaining half — accounting for 15% of excess deaths — would have to be no younger than 53 on average for fully one-third of the years lost in the pandemic to have been lost by somebody who didn’t die of Covid.
Ohio in February announced more than 4,000 additional deaths while reconciling its data, and Indiana added about 1,500. Smaller revisions have also recently come from Virginia, Minnesota and Rhode Island. On Thursday, authorities in West Virginia said medical providers hadn’t properly reported 168 deaths to the state’s public-health department.
“Nobody likes surprises, and nobody likes data that’s wrong because that’s what drives decisions,” said Ayne Amjad, West Virginia’s state health officer.
Like many countries, the U.S. is trying to track pandemic events nearly as they happen, and a big part of this effort has required speeding up how deaths are reported.
The first quarter of 2020 all-cause individual life death counts were in the range of 93% to 99% for the first quarter in the previous five years, similar to the CDC’s estimated actual to expected all-cause deaths for the population.
The second quarter of 2020 all-cause individual life death counts were in the range of 110% to 113% for the second quarter in the previous five years. This was lower than the CDC’s second-quarter estimate of 118% to 123% for the population.
The average attained age at death of the individual life COVID claims is 0.6 years older than the average age of non-COVID claims. The U.S. population had a much larger difference of 3.0 years between the average attained age of COVID and non-COVID deaths.
Author(s): Individual Life COVID-19 Project Work Group
States with Democratic governors had the highest incidence and death rates from Covid-19 in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, but states with Republican governors surpassed those rates as the crisis dragged on, a study released Tuesday found.
“From March to early June, Republican-led states had lower Covid-19 incidence rates compared with Democratic-led states. On June 3, the association reversed, and Republican-led states had higher incidence,” the study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina showed.
“For death rates, Republican-led states had lower rates early in the pandemic, but higher rates from July 4 through mid-December,” the study found.
As with geography, job loss was more widespread than excess mortality across age groups.
In April 2020, excess mortality increased with age and was largest among the oldest age group. Individuals ages 85 and older represent only 3% of the total U.S. population ages 25 years and older but accounted for 34% of the overall excess mortality in the country.
On the other hand, employment displacement decreased with age. It was largest among the younger age group (ages 25 to 44). These individuals make up only 39% of the U.S. population ages 25 and older but accounted for about half of the people 25 and older who lost their jobs nationwide.
What DeRosa told lawmakers had them aghast. Not only had Cuomo misled them; he had, in DeRosa’s telling, done it in order to keep relevant information hidden from U.S. investigators. If the latter were true, Cuomo administration officials could well be guilty of federal-obstruction and false-statements crimes. In other words, so shameful was their actual reason for covering up nursing-home deaths — namely, to make a wayward governor look like a fantasy hero — that Cuomo administration officials figured it was better to be seen as potentially felonious than to admit their crude political motivation.
As the New York Times reported on Thursday night, in the spring of 2020, DeRosa and other members of Cuomo’s inner circle, who have no public-health background, studiously purged the nursing-home death data from a report compiled by state health officials. The Justice Department was not eyeing them at the time. That happened months later, in August, when the feds began seeking information about the treatment of, and record-keeping about, COVID-stricken nursing-home residents by New York and three other states.
So what was going on at the time of the purge? Well — whaddya know! — it turns out that was just when Cuomo was quietly securing the state ethics approvals that would permit him to earn outside income from a book he’d decided to write. The book would inform the world about his unparalleled mastery of the COVID crisis — which, oddly enough, he contemplated as a work of nonfiction.
In its January 28 report, the attorney general’s office argued that low staffing levels in nursing homes was associated with higher death rates from the novel coronavirus. As evidence of that connection, the report presented a table (reproduced in Table 1 below) comparing death rates in nursing homes based on their star ratings for staffing from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).[5] It showed that homes with the lowest staffing grade of one star had an aggregate COVID-19 mortality rate of 7.13 percent, compared to 4.94 percent for homes with a five-star rating.
However, that table was based on the limited data available in mid-November, which encompassed 6,645 deaths, only half the number that are documented now.
When that table is brought up to date, it shows no clear association between lower staffing grades and higher coronavirus mortality (see Table 2). Homes with a three-star staff rating showed the largest percentage of deaths, at 13.62, compared to 12.98 for two-star homes and 12.14 for one-star homes.[6]
There were 55,071 new cases reported in the U.S. for Tuesday, according to the latest data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That was down from 58,810 a day earlier, and 71,436 a week earlier.
Reported U.S. deaths related to Covid-19 increased Tuesday to 1,924, from 1,566 a day earlier, according to the latest Johns Hopkins data.
While both new cases and deaths are down from January’s highs, deaths have begun to trend upward in the past week. The seven-day moving average of daily reported deaths, which smooths out irregularities in the data, was 2,046 as of Monday, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Johns Hopkins data. The 14-day average was 1,984. When the seven-day average is higher than the 14-day average, as it has been since last Wednesday, it indicates deaths are on the rise.
