More NPR nonsense

Another grossly misleading article on NPR. This one is called "Americans Are Dying In The Pandemic At Rates Far Higher Than In Other Countries" Here is a link. 

Let's pick this one apart piece by piece. 

Overall deaths in the United States this year are more than 85% higher than in places such as Germany, Israel and Denmark after adjusting for population size. Deaths in the U.S. are 29% higher than even in Sweden

According to the CDC, 2,188,554 people have died in the US in 2020 up to October 13. That is 10% more than normal. If that is 85% higher than those other countries, they should have 40% fewer deaths than normal so far this year. That is obviously ridiculous, but just to be sure, here is some available data from those countries:

Here is a graph from Germany's Federal Statistical Office. 2020 is the red curve. The blue region is the range for the last few years. Looks like this is a fairly typical year there.

The website of Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics is not working, but here is an excerpt from an article in Haaretz: "A summary of Israeli deaths from March through July [2020] shows a similar trend, even slightly lower compared to last year. The figures show that 18,476 Israelis died during this period, 211 fewer than during the same period in 2019". That's a 1% decline.

According to the Statistics Denmark, 40858 Danes died from 1/1/2019 through 10/4/2020, and 40775 died from 1/1/2020 through 10/4/2020, a 0.3% decrease.

According to Statistics Sweden, there were 9696 deaths in the first 40 weeks of 2020 compared to an average of 8262 for the first 40 weeks of the previous 5 years. This is a 17% increase. So Sweden is actually doing worse than the US.

Even looking just at confirmed COVID-19 deaths, the number of people dying since May 10th — again after adjusting for population size — is on average 50% higher than every other country in the study. In addition the rate people are dying in the U.S. has stayed far above everywhere else. Emanuel says the current elevated mortality rates are important because they eliminate the chaotic early months of the pandemic when testing, treatment and reporting varied dramatically around the globe.

This is an unfair comparison. Many parts of the US had their epidemic at different times. For example, Arizona, Florida, and Texas didn't really get started until July. Europe was done by June.

If the U.S. had managed to keep its per capita death rate at the level of Italy's, 79,120 fewer Americans would have died.

That means Italy had 36% fewer deaths per capita. Actually Italy had 574 deaths per 1M population while the US had 660. That's 13% less. Not that that's good for the US, but at least get your facts straight.