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Comment by fiblye | Hacker News Reader

The NYT has a tracker for this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

A few countries are close enough to be considered accurate. Some are off by over 100%.

The graphs only show actual vs. expected deaths and don't take any reported deaths from COVID-19 into account. They're simply about excess mortality, not about reporting accuracy.

Yes, that's the point. Absent another explanation for unusual deaths, it seems likely they are due to COVID-19.

Or people not going to the hospital in time because they are afraid of covid.

Yes, but there are also effects of lockdowns, shortened flu season, etc that lower mortality. E.g. Germany has practically zero excess mortality this year (within the usual variation). So people avoiding hospitals also shouldn't be a very large effect, at least over here.

It will be interesting, when it's all over and all numbers are in, to look at the statistics of this.

Or any number of other potentially unknown factors resulting from the completely unprescendented disruption to normal life that has been going on across the world for a number of months.

Anybody claiming to know specifically what to expect from something that has never happened before should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism. Especially if their only way of taking measurements is so imprecise and inconsistently applied.

Or people killing themself, because their economic base is destroyed.

The larger point is that increased mortality attributable to there being a global pandemic can be considered a consequence of the pandemic.

The deaths may not be directly attributable to the infectious agent and disease mechanism of SARS-COV-2 or COVID-19, that is, the virus or disease. But they are, in the absence of another plausible causal mechanism, part of the overall impact on public health.

Gross mortality anomoly is the truest measure of impact.

(Deeper discussions of causality and epistemology omitted.)

Yes, but they are not "undercounted" if the excess number matches the number of corona deaths.

The excess is already counting reported covid deaths.

Apart from things like heart attacks and strokes that are untreated because of patient caution?

European mortality statistics are published by the Euromomo network and can be found here:

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

Why isn't China on that list as well?

We don't have reliable information for how many people die in China per week, so we can't compare.

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