Continuing their agenda of alarming the public, the New York Times has published a new article suggesting this pandemic is worse than the Flu pandemic of 1918. Specifically, they report the excess death rate for Covid in 2020 at 16% while the same figure for 1918 is reported as 11%. How is this possible when the earlier flu killed more Americans (675,000), and the current US population is 3 times what it was then? Short answer: it's not.
The excess is easy to calculate for 2020 from CDC data. US Covid deaths 2020: 350,616. Normal US mortality 2019: 2,800,000. Excess mortality 2020: 12.5%
For 2018, we can use data from the census bureau. There are some caveats.
- The data only covers the "registration area" meaning states that are reporting their data. This shouldn't be too bad because we are only calculating percentages.
- Influenza and Pneumonia are reported separately to allow comparison with international data. The documents instructs that the categories should be lumped together.
- The data does not distinguish 'Spanish' influenza/pneumonia (IP) from other influenza/pneumonia.
The most straightforward approach simply compares total mortality for 1918 to previous years. Normal mortality had been decreasing since 1880 and was hovering around 1.41% by 1917. Total mortality in 1918 was 1.80%, so excess mortality was 30.0%
An alternative is to tease out the 'Spanish' influenza/pneumonia from the previous year's influenza/pneumonia. The total IP mortality rate for 1918 was 0.583% and the total IP mortality rate for 2017 was 0.167%. The difference is 0.416%. This is 29.5% excess mortality.
Final score: Covid 12%, Spanish Flu 30%
