Counting the lives lost to COVID

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Thursday, the 15th of April, 2021.

You’re listening to The World and Everything in It and we’re so glad you’ve made the decision to join us. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: And I’m Megan Basham.

First up on The World and Everything in It: COVID-19 statistics.

Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released provisional numbers showing how many lives the coronavirus took in 2020.

WORLD’s Sarah Schweinsberg breaks down the data.

SARAH SCHWEINSBERG, REPORTER: Three-point-three million Americans died last year, according to the CDC. That’s about 828 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 715 in 2019.

Another way to look at that: the country saw half a million more deaths last year—a near 16 percent increase from 2019.

Ali Mokdad is a professor of health metrics at the University of Washington. He says deaths over and above a previous year are called excess deaths.

MOKDAD: You would expect in a normal circumstance, like there is no war, there is no measure of natural or manmade disaster, you would expect mortality to follow the same pattern. So the way to compare what’s the impact of a shock on mortality is to compare this in a year compared to the previous year. And do it by age, by sex, by causes specific for COVID-19, for example…

To figure how many excess deaths to attribute to COVID-19, the CDC reviewed death certificates. The agency concluded the virus killed about 378,000 people last year, making it the third leading cause of death in 2020. It came in behind cancer and heart disease.

But according to the CDC, only 5 percent of death certificates listed COVID-19 as the only cause of death.

Ronald Fricker is a professor of statistics at Virginia Tech. He says the coronavirus was usually listed on death certificates as an underlying condition.

FRICKER: Typically, people will die from say, respiratory failure. And that’s the immediate cause. But what caused respiratory failure was COVID, for example. So ultimately, though, this is always a judgment call of a medical professional who’s assessing for a particular person in a particular circumstance, what they believe actually caused their death. 

CDC data also show how the virus affected different age groups. Not surprisingly, the most deaths happened among those 85 and older. Then between the ages of 75 to 84.

But Fricker says the age group that saw the biggest overall death rate increase came as a bit of a surprise.

FRICKER: So compared to the number of people that just die of all causes, the rate of 2020 compared to 2019, was about 24 percent higher for those aged 25 to 44. When for older folks, when you compare the number of people that died in 2020 to 2019, it was in the middle teens, 13,14, 15 percent, higher death rates. That’s from all causes though—not just from COVID.

So if 500,000 more people died last year and 378,000 of those are attributed to COVID, what about the other 126,000? Ronald Fricker says some probably died from COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic, while testing capacity was still limited.

FRICKER: And in other cases, we may be counting people who died who wouldn’t otherwise have because of restrictions or lack of access to medical care or or overstretched medical facilities because of COVID. So it’s probably a combination of both and some evidence is available to support both of those positions. So it’s probably a combination.

European nations also saw a jump in their excess mortality rates. Poland had the highest rate with a 12 percent increase, followed by Spain, then Belgium. The United Kingdom came in eighth at 7 percent.

Now as more countries begin to publish 2020 coronavirus data, politicians and researchers will also begin to debate death rates in relation to the legacy of lockdowns. Were they worth it?

Philippe Lemoine is a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. He argues they weren’t.

He cites similar transmission rates between strict lockdown states like California and more relaxed states like Florida. He also points to how despite resisting lockdowns, Sweden had the 23rd lowest number of excess deaths in Europe.

LEMOINE: I don’t think you can precisely estimate the effect of lockdown policies in general, but basically if you compare countries that have had extremely heavy restrictions, countries or states in the US, extremely heavy restrictions to those that have used the more liberal approach to mitigating the pandemic, you don’t see striking differences. 

Lemoine says COVID data aside, the economic and psychological price of lockdowns did not outweigh perceived benefits.

LEMOINE: I think if you just look at the effect they’ve had on people’s well being, that’s enough to make the cost not worth the benefit. 

But other scholars say it will take years to sort out whether lockdowns protected more people from an early death or made little difference while causing countless other problems.

Ryan Bourne is a scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of Economics in One Virus. He says conducting a cut and dry cost-benefit analysis isn’t that easy. And a politically charged atmosphere doesn’t help.

BOURNE: I like to think of lock downs as kind of bundles, some of which might have been useful in curbing the spread of the virus, but others clearly have costs that exceed their benefits. I think in the longer term, you would hope that academics would have the freedom to engage in this retrospective analysis a lot more carefully and empirically than we’ve seen so far.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Sarah Schweinsberg.

Photo/iStock

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.