. Let me ask you a question.
What do you think is the real corona virus death toll?
It appears it could be more than 54 thousand deaths higher than the official death toll.
And I'm going to explain how the CDC data points us to that conclusion in a second.
But at least to start, theoretically, anytime you have something as big as a pandemic which
infects more than five million people in the United States, where it 5.2 million official
cases to a country of more than 330 million people, people die every day for corona virus
and other reasons.
There are co morbidities.
There are other factors.
It's going to be unlikely that the official death toll is exactly what the real death
toll is for the virus.
Now, on the one side, there are conspiracy theories from the right that are about deception
and politics, where they say the real death toll is much lower.
It's not 166 thousand.
It's much smaller.
They claim this is not me.
This is the arguments some on the right make.
A lot of deaths are being counted as coronavirus and they're really not.
And they'll talk about someone died in a car crash and a hospital counted.
It is coronavirus because they get more money that way or whatever, or Democrats are lying
and blowing up the death rate in order to make political points or whatever the case
may be.
Now, you should be skeptical of that theory.
And indeed, there's no evidence for that theory other than if you want to be anecdotal.
There might be cases where it's not a car accident.
But, you know, it's an infection caused by a comorbidity in an elderly person who had
corona virus.
And maybe there's like some debate as to should this or shouldn't this count as a corona virus
death.
But these are small numbers of situations in a country with 5.2 million infections.
You're bound to have some anecdotes like that.
But on the other side, there's a much more compelling reason to think the real corona
virus death toll is dramatically higher than the official.
And it is something called excess deaths.
The number of extra deaths during the March to July period suggests that more than 54000
additional people have died of coronavirus be above and beyond the official death toll.
This is derived when you look at excess deaths and in the United States because we have so
many people and so many years of data and such detailed statistics about disease.
We know how many people on average will die of all causes based on our population, based
on what's called the normal amount of death.
We know, okay, if you add up expected car accident deaths, cancer deaths, heart disease,
flu altogether, we know when you don't have a pandemic how many people typically die.
And if you look at the deaths we would expect from March 15th to July 25th.
You see that during those dates.
There were almost 200, 1000 excess deaths, deaths beyond what we would normally have.
And during that time, the official coronavirus death toll was only 140, 7000.
That leaves about 54000 extra deaths not officially attributed to coronavirus.
Now, epidemiologists favor looking at excess deaths to gauge the impact of a pandemic because
excess deaths don't depend on testing people and knowing exactly who had the virus.
Posthumous testing, testing when someone goes into the hospital, et cetera.
And indeed, when you look at excess deaths, everything tracks consistently with this theory.
If you look at where the excess deaths disproportionately are, it's in the states hardest hit by corona
virus.
And it is a very coherent story that excess death analysis points us do.
So in all likelihood, the real coronavirus death toll right now is at least 54000 deaths
higher than the original one.
It's even more because that was March 15 to July 25.
In the two weeks since July 25, we've had a resurgence in deaths and in all likelihood,
there are more uncounted deaths during that period.
So what is the likely real coronavirus death toll?
Remember, official is 166.
It's probably somewhere around 225 to 235.
And rapidly approaching 250000 deaths.
We are going to have to accept that the death toll is much higher than many think.
When the pandemic is so widespread, when tests are still today taking five to seven days
or longer to come back with results, we know we aren't capturing all the cases and therefore
it follows.
We're not capturing all the deaths either.
We later will have to see what is the long term impact on the lungs, on the heart, on
other systems from having and recovering from corona virus.
Because you could have a situation where years down the line, there are premature deaths
caused by damage done to vital organs by corona virus.
We don't know the extent of that yet.
That's something the medical community is looking at.
Any deaths are tragic.
We have many unnecessary deaths due to the failed Trump response.
But we also just have to face the reality that by now we probably have somewhere between
55 and 60000 deaths that are not in the official death count, which are due to corona virus,
which gets us to what happens in November.
And how is the right trying to get themselves reelected despite Donald Trump's failed response?
Let's talk about that next