In recent weeks, we’ve been keeping an eye on weekly total deaths as they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Weekly deaths—as opposed to COVID-19 death totals—provide some needed context. This is important, since we now know that doctors and health administrators are encouraged to be—in the words of Deborah Birx—”liberal” with counting COVID-19 deaths.
This week I’m looking at week 16 (the week ending April 18). The CDC says that week 17 data is “100% complete” but experience suggests that it will still be a week or two before we have 90 percent or so of the total.
Even week 16 will continue to adjust upward, but further large adjustments are unlikely at this point. These numbers are CDC estimates.
Looking at the data we do have, there were 67,059 total deaths in the US during the week ending April 18 (week 16). That’s up 24 percent (or 13,206 deaths) over the week 16 average (53,852) for 2017–19. Using the average for 2017–19 as the baseline, “excess deaths” number about 13,000 or 0.004 percent of the US population. Interestingly, so far this year, only week 15 (the week ending April 11) has exceeded the total mortality for week 2 of 2018, which was 67,295. The 2017–18 season was a very bad flu year according to the CDC (week 1 is on the left in blue and week 16 is on the right in yellow for each year):
A large portion of this continues to come from New York State. In New York, the week 16 total was 4,056 deaths, which was 2,083 above the 2017–19 average of 1,972. So, about one-sixth of all excess death in week 16 came from New York. Deaths were up 105 percent over the average for week 16, with excess deaths at more than 2,000 for week 16:
Week 15 (the week ending April 11) may have been the peak week, if we assume COVID-19 was the driving factor in total deaths that week. Worldometer data suggests that COVID-19 deaths peaked the week ending April 11 and have fallen since then.
To offer an example of another large state, we can also look at Florida. Florida has not seen nearly the surge in total deaths that we’ve seen in New York or nationwide.
For week 16, total deaths in Florida were only up 8.4 percent (or 331 deaths) over the 2017–19 average for the week.
