A quickly-retracted article published in the Johns Hopkins news-letter last month has spawned a spate of internet posts. Theses posts claim that the total death rate in 2020 is no higher than previous years. The implication usually made is that COVID-19 really isn’t that dangerous, and the pandemic is just a hoax concocted to control us. The data does not support this assertion, at all. The CDC posts data for total deaths on their website here. The data is broken down by week. If you plot the data for 2020, and compare it to previous years, it looks like this.
The CDC’s website states that it can take up to 8 weeks for death certificates to be recorded. So everything after week 42 is likely to be revised up significantly for 2020. Plus, we still have a couple of weeks to go this year. Even so, the total number of deaths recorded in the United States for 2020 is already significantly higher than previous years. And the difference will only look worse after all of the data comes in. If anything, the number of total deaths recorded so far this year suggests we might be undercounting COVID-related mortalities.
To be clear, I’m totally against lockdowns and other draconian government measures used to combat this virus. I believe that informed adults should be able to weigh the risks themselves and make their own choices about how to live their lives. Pushing fake data is antithetical to this cause.