Misleading: No Excess Deaths in 2020 Due to COVID

Misbar discovered that on November 22, 2020, an article was published in the Johns Hopkins Newsletter that was written by Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s degree program at Johns Hopkins University. In the article, Briand critically analyzed the effect of COVID-19 on U.S. deaths using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

According to Briand’s analysis, the total number of U.S. deaths has remained fairly constant, but the numbers of the usual causes of death such as heart disease has decreased at a rate consistent with the increased numbers of COVID-19 deaths. In other words, according to Briand, the COVID-19 death toll is misleading. Briand believes that deaths due to heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza and pneumonia may instead be recategorized as being due to COVID-19. To her, this is likely the main explanation as to why COVID-19 deaths drastically increased while deaths by all other diseases experienced a significant decrease.

On November 26, 2020, Johns Hopkins retracted the article and replaced it with an article showing different information and explaining that Briand is not a medical researcher or a disease expert. 

Since the article was published and retracted, multiple studies have been brought forth showing that U.S. deaths have increased this year. According to a discussion published in JAMAnetwork.com, U.S. deaths increased by 20 percent during March-July 2020. COVID-19 was a documented cause of 67 percent of these excess deaths.

There are two more points of discussion that need to be considered in fact checking whether the increased number of deaths are due to COVID-19 or not. The first is the fact that we have an aging population. The proportion of people aged 65 years and older increased globally from 6.1 percent to 8.8 percent, and the number of global deaths increased by 9 million, between 1990 and 2017. The other factor to be considered is an increasingly unhealthy population. According to the Centers for Disease Control, from 1999–2000 through 2017–2018, the prevalence of obesity increased from 30.5 percent to 42.4 percent, and the prevalence of severe obesity increased from 4.7 percent to 9.2 percent. Increased obesity may also be responsible for more deaths each year. The understanding of these increases in mortality will become more clear in the years to come post COVID-19. 

The excess death rate for 25- to 44-year-olds is up 26.5 percent in 2020. The CDC said that there were around 299,000 excess deaths this year, and at least 2 of 3 were from COVID-19.

More sophisticated analyses that include not only past mortality data but also future data is needed to see the true impact of COVID-19 on excess deaths in the U.S.