Coronavirus Death Toll in Seven States May Be 9,000 Higher Than Official Figures Suggest

The coronavirus death toll worldwide is thought to be far higher than official records suggest, and now The New York Times reports that total deaths in seven U.S. states hard-hit by the coronavirus pandemic are up nearly 50 percent from the usual figures. The analysis of the seven states—Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, and New Jersey—shows 9,000 more excess deaths over and above the 18,000 already attributed to COVID-19. Increasingly, analysts around the world are using the difference between total deaths from all causes during the pandemic and total death from all causes in normal times, saying this figure paints a clearer picture of the true impact of the pandemic, as it also captures deaths caused by knock-on effects of the virus, such as stresses on the health-care system or, on the flip side, reduced road traffic accidents. “It gives you an overall sense of how big things are,” said Samuel Clark, a professor of sociology at Ohio State University whose work is in demography and epidemiology, of the total excess-deaths figure. “For now, you can basically attribute the excess mortality to COVID-19. But you also grab all the things that are not COVID at all, but are probably created by the situation.”