In Scientific American of September 2021, page 84, they present the work of Andrew Stokes and others on the possible true US death toll for 2020 from Covid-19 from the excess deaths. The article says that 82% of the excess deaths were from verified Covid cases, but that the result was tentative. On Oct. 12, 2021, on Andrew Stokes’ Twitter account, @astokespop, he now gives 87% of the 439,698 excess deaths in 2020 were reported due to Covid. That would be 382,537 reported Covid deaths. He says that this is from counting all death certificates which mention Covid as a principal or related cause. The point of the work is to indicate missed deaths in 2020 that could be Covid deaths, for the 3,000 US counties, to advise them to take extra Covid-19 cautions.
Looking at the present IHME model of Covid true and recorded deaths by Dec. 31, 2020, gives the true Covid deaths as 405,202, and the recorded deaths as 352,541, with a difference of 52,661, or 13.0%. The percent of the excess deaths would be 405,202 divided by 439,698 equals 92%.
The difference of the IHME Covid deaths of 405,202 versus the Stokes’ 382,537, is 22,665, which is only 5.6%, so the two estimates are converging on each other.
As of yesterday, the IHME modeled Covid deaths were 838,988, with the recorded ones being 722,453, giving a difference of 116,535, or 13.9% of the true modeled deaths, or that the recorded ones were 86.1% of the true modeled deaths.
A separate point of view is that all of the excess deaths are due to our lack of success in confronting the Covid pandemic head-on without politics, egos, pseudo-science, misinformation, human weakness, and a public partly influenced to be suspicious of government. These effects are still going on in America, almost two years after Covid-19 was identified, analyzed, and vaccines mapped out. Our scientific progress did not fail us, but it could have been backed much more vigorously in the last several decades when we started confronting virus threats.
We also do this comparison with Stokes’ group and the IHME modeling for deaths in California for 2020. The California data is from the August 29th update of Stokes’ paper.
Stokes’ group has California expected deaths of 269,553, minus observed deaths of 312,029, giving excess deaths of 42,476, or 15.8%. Of the excess, 33,004 are reported Covid-19, or 77.7%.
The IHME model for California in 2020 has true Covid deaths of 32,051, against reported of 25,782, giving a difference of 6,269, or 19.6% of true being not reported, or 80.4% being reported. While there is a clear discrepancy of the basic reported factual data of 33,004 in Stokes, versus 25,782 in IHME, it could lie in what the definitions of “reported” are in the two cases. In the IHME, it could be what is listed is the principal cause of death, whereas the Stokes listing includes any mention of the Covid infection. Thus the Stokes’ reported data could be closer to the true Covid deaths in IHME, or 33,004 compared to the IHME 32,051.
I want to give full credit to the authors and institutions involved in what I have called Stokes’ research, for short.
