It’s a good news and bad news world.
On Monday, there was good news from Britain, with news that a COVID-19 vaccine under development at the University of Oxford has shown promising results in creating an immune system response in both young and elderly patients.
It is by far the best news to surface in recent weeks about the COVID-19 pandemic, which seems, in many places, to be surging once again.
But there was also bad news from Mexico, suggesting that far more people in that country have died from the virus than official tallies have counted. And it’s not only Mexico.
And it’s not just Mexico: there’s this somewhat dry piece of scholarship from the CDC: “As of Oct. 15, 216,025 deaths from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been reported in the United States; however, this number might underestimate the total impact of the pandemic on mortality,” the report says.
The Mexican news is coming as a result of something you could call looking in the rear-view mirror — researchers examined death totals across that country so far this year, and found a huge increase, a phenomenon statisticians call “excess deaths.”
The term “excess death” covers a lot of ground: fundamentally, though, it’s an increased number of deaths year over year.
“Estimates of the numbers of deaths directly attributable to COVID-19 might be limited by factors such as the availability and use of diagnostic testing (including postmortem testing) and the accurate and complete reporting of cause of death information on the death certificate,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says. “Excess death analyses are not subject to these limitations because they examine historical trends in all-cause mortality to determine the degree to which observed numbers of deaths differ from historical norms.”
The concept was thrown into sharp relief Monday, when Mexican researchers revealed that, while the official death total from confirmed cases of COVID-19 in that country was around 89,000, the actual number should be more than 139,000. The difference? Not all COVID-19 deaths were recorded properly, in part due to an absence of early testing. But the numbers carry an even more serious shadow: by Sept. 26, Mexican researchers found, the number of excess deaths in Mexico so far this year had reached 190,170 — so, close to 200,000 more people in that country have died this year than generally occurs, 111,000 more than the official COVID-19 statistics would have accounted for.
COVID-19 plays a more interesting role than simply being a listed cause of death: while a certain number of excess deaths might not be directly caused by the virus, they can also be connected to it. Researchers point out that, during the pandemic, patients may not have been able to get treatment for other illnesses that caused deaths, or may have avoided hospitals and doctors altogether, fearful of catching the virus.
And it’s not just Mexico: there’s this somewhat dry piece of scholarship from the CDC: “As of Oct. 15, 216,025 deaths from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been reported in the United States; however, this number might underestimate the total impact of the pandemic on mortality,” the report says.
But reviewing excess deaths, the report found, “Overall, an estimated 299,028 excess deaths have occurred in the United States from late January through Oct. 3, 2020.”
The bottom line?
While there are plenty of us who are fed up with COVID-19 restrictions and are longing for a return to a pre-COVID world, there’s a lot we still don’t know, even about the damage the virus has already done.
In a race we don’t even yet understand, the best hope is still the vaccine finish line.
