Postson social media are attempting to downplay the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic using a chart that shows that the 2020 U.S. death toll hasn’t changed much from previous years."People died before Covid. Amazingly the death rate hasn’t changed. How can that be with such a deadly virus????" one user wrote.
But the comparison is flawed for a few reasons. The 2020 statistics cited are not the final figures, and the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that hundreds of thousands of excess American deaths are attributed to the virus this year. Lastly, it ignores that COVID-19 has killed over 290,000 Americans to-date, the highest virus death toll in the world.
Meanwhile, in another report, theCDC estimatedthat COVID-19 has caused almost 200,000 excess deaths in the U.S. from late January through early October. Excess deaths are defined in the report as the number of persons who have died from all causes, in excess of the expected number of deaths for a given place and time.
"Overall, an estimated 299,028 excess deaths occurred from late January through October 3, 2020, with 198,081 (66%) excess deaths attributed to COVID-19," the agency reported.
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Lauren Rossen, a data scientist with CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, told PolitiFact that the numbers of deaths in 2020 are "without a question NOT on par with previous years" and that claims that the numbers are equivalent are based on misinterpretations and misuse of the available data.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/dec/11/facebook-posts/chart-comparing-2020-us-death-toll-previous-years-/
