Thread by @alexandraphelan

Today, @nytimes has examined the CDC's data for excess mortality ("deaths above normal") over the pandemic.

Since March, at least 200,000 more Americans have died than usual.

That's ~60,000 more deaths than officially directly linked to #COVID19.

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nytimes.com/interactive/20…

You can see the pattern of excess deaths match the movement of the pandemic across the US.

This suggests that official death counts may be substantially underestimating overall effects of #covid19: inc. deaths from SARS-CoV-2 & other causes linked to the pandemic.

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Accurate counts during epidemics are challenging: mortality from past pandemics (eg 1918 & 2009 flu) have been recalculated afterwards.

But this shows how critical accurate data reporting systems are & why Trump Admin's decisions on data are so worrying:
wsj.com/articles/covid…

A timely new piece highlighting the significant scale of #COVID19 in NYC:

"the relative increase [of excess deaths] during early COVID-19 period was substantially greater than during the peak of the 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic."

jamanetwork.com/journals/jaman…