Hidden Deaths

The death toll for Covid-19 currently stands at 5113 in the US and 48,407 for the world.

This number is almost certainly a lowball estimate.  Josh Marshall's crew at TPM has been examining what he calls the "hidden mortality."  The idea is that we have deaths happening that are A) not being attributed to Covid-19 and B) people are dying from OTHER causes that could've been prevented if there hadn't been a pandemic.  In time, we will likely be able to look at statistical modeling to determine roughly how many added deaths we have had, but as we have seen with Fox and other conservative media outlets, expert data is routinely ignored.

Let's say we have a "good" outcome of 100,000 deaths from Covid-19. According to what we have seen in Italy and Spain, we can't anticipate that there would be almost another 100,000 hidden deaths from hospital overload.  This doesn't account for long term hidden mortality from issues like missing cancer or dialysis treatments, delayed diagnoses of serious illness, and frankly the mental health complications that we are going to see from this.

Some idiot on Twitter was pointing out that most of the deaths in the NYC area were accompanied by other health conditions like asthma, diabetes, cancer or heart and lung disease. His "point" was that Covid-19 wasn't really killing these people, but that their underlying health conditions were.  This is precisely the wrong way to think about the health impact of this illness. We are going to be seeing a marked increase in the loss of human life that goes beyond the horror stories we are currently seeing in Queens.