21,000 More Deaths Than Normal in NYC Since March

"The New York Times reports that there are typically about 6,000 deaths in New York City between March 11 and April 25 in any year, but during that same time period in 2020 there were about 27,000 deaths in the city."
https://www.nationalreview.com/corn...right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=fourth

The "overcounting" meme that's been bouncing around on the Far Right (and here) was always a really stupid idea. If we're missing a lot of active cases due to a shortage of testing, then of course we were missing a lot of deaths too, and now the evidence is starting to come in.

Officially, NYC has 12,000 Covid deaths. If that number is closer to 20,000, that has obvious implications for the rest of us. L.A. County has 20,000 cases now (that we know about). And we're about 20% more populous than NYC. Are we going to lose 20,000+ people? That's a staggering number of city residents to lose, and will affect (obviously), California's plan to reopen. And since California is the 5th biggest economy in the world, our delayed reopening will affect the rest of y'all.

 

There is an abundance of research out there about the undercounting of deaths. Here are four articles that I know about:

Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reported
To know the real number of coronavirus cases in the US, China, or Italy, researchers say multiply by 10
36,000 Missing Deaths: Tracking the True Toll of the Coronavirus Crisis
U.S. deaths soared in early weeks of pandemic, far exceeding number attributed to covid-19


And I keep reminding folks who want to argue that the undercount on the confirmed case numbers meaning that this virus is less lethal the fact that the denominator can rise at a rate that is roughly 20x the nominator and the mortality will still stay around 5%. In other words, even if there at 20 unconfirmed infections, so long as there is just 1 unreported death, that means that the mortality will stay around 5%.