A year and some odd months ago when we first started hearing about Covid I was following the data super closely – because it was data and new and interesting and slightly frightening, but after a year or so I started to get bored and stopped paying much attention. I would see friends on Facebook sharing anti-mask or anti-vax stuff, some funny, some rationally questioning, but most of it either very conspiratorial or just wrong and I would ignore it.
A few weeks ago my uncle passed away from Covid. Since then I have found my tolerance for bad science reporting and misleading memes has gone downhill. I don’t want to get into the political aspect of public health policy. But I do want to rant a little about how misrepresenting or misunderstanding the information that is available to us as it is literally killing people. Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory, and confirmation bias is really hard for anyone to overcome or set aside. I understand that and I am every bit as vulnerable to it as the next person. But I think this is important, so I am taking the time to put the data into context and answer the questions I have seen most commonly and maybe help debunk some of the most egregious errors I have seen floating around.
One claim I have seen many times is that Covid deaths are actually much lower than is reported to the CDC because “the way deaths are reported has changed” or “people who died ‘with covid’ are being reported as having died ‘from covid'” and the occasional claim that the flu was cured last year.
If these claims were true we would expect to see:
1. Over all death rates would comparable to previous years. — The theory being that Covid hasn’t really killed many people. While some deaths are Covid related they are actually a small fraction of deaths. So the overall number of deaths from all causes should be about the same.
2. The number of deaths from other causes would be lower. — Since other deaths are being reported as Covid deaths these other causes are being under reported.
3 Specifically the flu ‘disappearing’ — We would expect a very low number of flu deaths reported and the number of flu deaths would be inconsistent with the death trend of the flu in previous years.
So the questions we can ask from this are “Did the overall number of deaths change last year?”, “Did the number of deaths from other causes change?” and “Did the number of cases of death from the flu go down dramatically?”
Did the overall number of deaths change last year?
Source: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234
If you look at the chart above you can see that there was a significant increase in overall deaths last year. You can easily see that Covid was the third leading cause of death and the Covid deaths are comparable to the additional deaths we see over previous years. So the answer to the question is “yes, the overall number of deaths did increase last year”.
Did the number of deaths from other causes change?
Not significantly. Here are the difference between 2020 deaths and the average deaths over the previous five years.
Total +565929.2
Heart disease +44685.8
Cancer +541.8
Covid-19 +345323
Unintentional Injuries (includes automotive accidents) +28566.4
Stroke +13717.4
Chronic lower respiratory disease -5623.6
Alzheimer disease +15064.8
Diabetes +17956
Influenza and pneumonia -1139.8
Kidney disease +1542.2
Suicide -1603.2
For the theory that Covid deaths were actually some other type of death and just misreported to hold true there would have to be a corresponding decrease in deaths in other areas. This just didn’t happen.
Did the flu disappear?
The number of deaths reported from Influenza and pneumonia last year was 53495 is about 4000 higher than 2019 but 5000 less than 2018. So no, the flu did not disappear.
I am sure just one read over this probably won’t convince anyone, but if you find this data doesn’t convince you that Covid is a serious health issue, or if you find yourself trying to find alternative fact or looking for some way to dismiss or diminish this information please take a moment to ask “would this information be convincing if I held the opposite belief before I read it. Then go to the source information and read that as well. Confirmation Bias is really hard to see in ourselves, it is good to think about how data and information looks to someone with a completely different point of view. If you would like to read more about confirmation bias strategies Babson college has a good article. While it is more specific to auditors the general concepts hold true.