The new study provides the most compelling data yet to suggest that excess mortality rates from chronic illnesses and other natural causes were actually driven by COVID-19 infections.

For the study, Stokes, Paglino, and colleagues utilized novel statistical methods to analyze monthly data on natural-cause deaths and reported COVID-19 deaths for 3,127 counties over the first 30 months of the pandemic, from March 2020 to August 2022. They estimated that 1.2 million excess natural-cause deaths occurred in US counties during this time period, and found that roughly 163,000 of these deaths did not have COVID-19 listed at all on the death certificates.

Now if we could get an estimate of how much chronic illness covid is causing...

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[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This is from February 2024 (i.e. it's a year old) and the undercount was significant but was not all that enormous. The study indicated that the official count was about 14% low.

[–] dolores_clitoris@hexbear.net 12 points 2 months ago

“This work is important because our ability to detect and correctly assign deaths during an epidemic goes to the heart of our understanding of the disease and how we organize our response,” says Nahid Bhadelia.

The undercount is pretty enormous, when you consider that the motive behind it is to avoid properly responding to epidemics/pandemics (now and in the future).