The CDC tracks total deaths in the US and also separately
reports the Pneumonia and Influenza deaths and as a percentage of total
deaths. The link is: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2
The graphic highlights the impact of a severe flu season as
happened in the beginning of 2018.
The raw data is even more informative.
With a country of 350 million, I would expect at least 3.5 million deaths per year. In fact recently all cause deaths have been around 2.8 million people per year. This works out to about 54000 deaths per week on the average. A new pandemic disease should have a noticeable affect on these numbers as was seen for the severe flu in early 2018 when deaths per week reached 67495 at its peak.
The CDC data reported at the 'view chart data' link gives total deaths each week since 2013
Interestingly, data for the weeks 3 to 11 of 2020 show
FEWER deaths per week in 2020 than any year since 2016. One might expect social
distancing and other recent social changes to impact deaths from other causes
as well which might show up in the overall death statistics. For the first 9
weeks of this year (2020), there are more than 2500 fewer deaths per week on average
compared to the year before. For the most recent two weeks reported the
differences are 10000 and 20000 fewer deaths per week. (I'm willing to wait on
the possibility of incomplete reports but the CDC data already waits a full 2
weeks before reporting their initial numbers.)
I would be interested in a breakdown of all causes to see
where this significant change is coming from. Perhaps fewer traffic
fatalities? fewer deaths during elective surgery? All sorts of possibilities
beyond the impact on infectious disease transmission.
Raw numbers:
| CDC | All cause mortality in the US | |||||||||
| Year | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | difference | |||
| Week | from 2019 | |||||||||
| 1 | 61737 | 55788 | 59763 | 66134 | 58287 | 58822 | -535 | |||
| 2 | 61141 | 55525 | 60980 | 67495 | 58350 | 58670 | -320 | |||
| 3 | 58628 | 55182 | 59293 | 64647 | 58193 | 56942 | 1251 | |||
| 4 | 57269 | 55606 | 58047 | 62780 | 57831 | 56111 | 1720 | |||
| 5 | 57284 | 54896 | 58432 | 60974 | 58122 | 54926 | 3196 | |||
| 6 | 56420 | 55106 | 59038 | 61110 | 58489 | 55054 | 3435 | |||
| 7 | 56348 | 55785 | 58479 | 59779 | 57915 | 53647 | 4268 | |||
| 8 | 55668 | 54873 | 58288 | 57793 | 57856 | 52985 | 4871 | |||
| 9 | 55732 | 55875 | 57256 | 56692 | 57914 | 51721 | 6193 | |||
| 10 | 55272 | 56112 | 57477 | 57093 | 58487 | 47917 | 10570 | |||
| 11 | 54262 | 54462 | 56656 | 56326 | 57869 | 37641 | 20228 | |||
| data as of 14 Mar 2020 as reported on 26 Mar 2020 | ||||||||||
| https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2 | Something to think about. |
What do you think? |
||||||||
