Fill a room with 75 elderly people and randomly choose 25 to get infected. Choose 5 to be hospitalized. Choose 1 to die.
That's been the pandemic up through September in the US for those older than 65. And that's relatively "good" mitigation with this virus.
- https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
- https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html
- https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
According to the CDC, as of November 17th, we had 875k excess deaths. Through September the CDC estimates we had 921k coronavirus deaths. If we extrapolate that figure out to the present by adding subsequent confirmed coronavirus deaths, we would have about ~990k coronavirus deaths. If we use the death undercount of the CDC's coronavirus burden model, we would be over a million coronavirus deaths by now.
A staggering death toll as we near two years since the start of the pandemic.
Coronavirus deaths can be higher than excess deaths if other causes of death fell during this time period. For example Flu deaths have been significantly reduced by the disease control measures of the pandemic. This is what has been seen in jurisdictions with not much coronavirus spread like New Zealand, South Korea, and Australia. These countries have had negative excess deaths as coronavirus mitigation reduced other deaths as well.
Important Thanksgiving travel PSA:
