Correction: April 2020 Excess Death in NYC
Post #551
In this prior post, a major spreadsheet error led to misrepresentation of the excess death recorded in April of 2020 in New York City. The actual figure is much worse. When dealing with the horror of mass casualty, bias can creep in because the analyst doesn’t know how to react to astronomical numbers.
A really bad number, because it is already really bad, can be accidentally taken at face value as being accurate — rather than to double-check it to make sure things aren’t even worse. After double-checking, April 2020 deaths are even worse than I thought.
After first getting it wrong, here is how April 2020 in NYC “really” compares to other mass casualty events:
The April 2020 NYC excess death rate (right bar) was the worst event in this graph. The Holocaust monthly kill rate shown is only for occupied Europe, where it was even higher than domestic kill rates (i.e., rates inside of Germany).
April deaths in NYC dwarfed other mass casualty events such as the 1779 outbreak of smallpox in Boston, and they were even worse than the average monthly kill rate during the Holocaust.
Using multiples of the average monthly excess death rates, April 2020 in NYC was 7.4 times worse than World War I, 5.8 times worse than the 1918 Spanish Flu, 2.8 times worse than the smallpox outbreak of 1779 in Boston, and 2.6 times worse than the NAZI Holocaust.
NOTES: To get expected deaths for April 2020, the February 2020 death count was multiplied by 0.92 (to correct for the seasonality of deaths). The excess deaths were the actual deaths of April 2020, minus the expected deaths. A NYC population of 8.34 million was used in order to form an excess death rate for the month of April.
[click to enlarge]
Reference
[monthly deaths by age and region] — CDC. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
[16,543,185 died in 54 months of fighting, from nations whose sum total of population was 960 million] — World War I casualties. Available: https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/reperes112018.pdf
[Annualized 1.08% kill rate of Holocaust (Occupied Europe only)] — DEMOCIDE: NAZI GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER. 20,946,000 Victims: Nazi Germany 1933 To 1945. By R.J. Rummel. Available: https://hawaii.edu/powerkills/NAZIS.CHAP1.HTM
[Smallpox in Boston in 1779 led to 1,000 deaths per 100,000] — December 31, 2014. Special Edition on Infectious Disease. The Fight Over Inoculation During the 1721 Boston Smallpox Epidemic. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/special-edition-on-infectious-disease/2014/the-fight-over-inoculation-during-the-1721-boston-smallpox-epidemic/
[Best 1918 Spanish flu excess death estimate, excluding India, is 487 per 100,000] — Spreeuwenberg P, Kroneman M, Paget J. Reassessing the Global Mortality Burden of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. Am J Epidemiol. 2018 Dec 1;187(12):2561-2567. doi: 10.1093/aje/kwy191. PMID: 30202996; PMCID: PMC7314216. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7314216/
[most Spanish Flu deaths were not even from the Spanish Flu] — Morens DM, Taubenberger JK, Fauci AS. Predominant role of bacterial pneumonia as a cause of death in pandemic influenza: implications for pandemic influenza preparedness. J Infect Dis. 2008 Oct 1;198(7):962-70. doi: 10.1086/591708. PMID: 18710327; PMCID: PMC2599911. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2599911/