Undercounting the COVID-19 Deaths

The excess number of deaths that are not explicitly being attributed to SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) has become mainstream news recently. The New York Times recently put out a series of graphs that look at localities that provide their COVID-19 death statistics in comparison to the average number of deaths in the same time period over the previous five years. Those five years include the late winter-early spring of 2018, when a particularly lethal flu virus dominated.

The U.S. deaths for flu for the 2017-18 season was initially calculated at 79,400 and then reduced to 61,000. The former number would have made it the worst flu season since modern tracking techniques in the mid-1970s and even the adjusted numbers made it one of the worst. Due to the 2017-18 bad flu season, in the initial parts of 2020 the number of deaths showed a slight decline when averaged out over previous years.

The United Kingdom provides mortality statistics, including those deaths due to coronavirus weekly, with about a two week delay. These numbers are gathered separately for England and Wales (combined), Scotland, and Northern Ireland. I present these below as a peek into both the number of increased deaths attributed to COVID-19 and the number not attributed.

I updated these tables using the figures most recently available as of 4/29/2020.

England and Wales.

First, England and Wales which have a combined population of 59,115,800 (2018). The raw numbers came from the UK Office of National Statistics, England and Wales .

*The initial period of deaths are presented as average deaths per week. The determination of excess deaths not classified as COV-19 (1 - (column 2/(column 4 - column 3)) as percentage) is performed the two most recent weeks when total deaths rise above noise. An excess death figure of 100% means that the increased deaths over the week were twice what was attributed to COVID-19.

England and Wales are having a considerable degree worse time with COVID-19 than Scotland or Northern Ireland, below.

Scotland

Here are the numbers for Scotland which has a population of 5,438,100 (2018). Here the raw numbers are from the UK official site for Scotland. Note: Scotland does their counting using Week Beginning rather than Week Ending and start on a different weekday.

Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland has a population of 1,881,600 (2018). The raw numbers came from the UK official site for Northern Ireland.

The Scotland and the Northern Ireland figures are not included in the New York Times article cited above. I used the figures for only the most recent weeks in estimating the undercounting of COV-19 deaths. In each instance, the undercounting occurred to a much lesser degree over subsequent weeks and, in the most recent weeks, there was even overcounting.

Previously:
SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Mortality Rates
The Coronavirus: Potential Treatments and Drugs to Potentially Avoid