The latest CDC study on how COVID is being spread caught my attention. In a separate story, I breakdown who is spreading the vid’ and how it’s happening. One number, in particular, made me wonder how many COVID-19 cases are really out there. That number, well it's 24%. According to the CDC, that’s the percentage of people who have the rona’ but never show symptoms.
While there’s no way to precisely know how many people have the virus but never get tested, one way to get closer to reality is through the CDC’s excess death information. By comparing the number of COVID-19 attributed deaths to the CDC’s excess deaths.
The metric averages five years of deaths calculated weekly and adjusted by population changes. This is helpful because it accounts for all variables. Whether everyone had been tested for the virus or if no one had. It also doesn’t matter how deaths were categorized. Simply, how many people died and how many normally would have. The most recent excess death data we have is from January 9th. So that’s where I’m drawing the comparison.
The total number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the US was 381,432. The excess number of deaths since the pandemic began was 471,342. And, the total excess deaths beyond reported COVID cases was 89,910.
So, what does this mean? It means, that there are 19% more people who died than usual during the pandemic that have not been classified as COVID deaths. What that also means is that at any given time there are about 19% more people who have COVID-19 than know it, or have at least tested positively for it.
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