New York Spring 2020 COVID Deaths vs Everywhere Else
As you’ve noticed (or haven’t 🤣) , my posts have been few and far between in recent months as I’ve basically exiting the COVID data space (not much new to report) and haven’t found much else that interested me enough to dive in to.
My guess, however, is there will be some COVD related topic I will want to take a look at from time to time…
Anyway, short post today to look at a topic Jessica Hockett has spent a lot of time exploring, the massive reporting of deaths in NYC in spring 2020. See here:
While Jessica has shown just how absurd the numbers look from NYC in a very brief window of time in 2020, what I have not seen from her or elsewhere (*** I totally could have missed it) was a view of how much of an anomaly NYC was in Spring 2020 vs. anywhere else during any period when large number of COVID deaths were being reported.
Using the same CDC data set that was used to support many of my posts and my dashboards, I sought to compare the worst month, in terms of COVID deaths, among the 50 most populated counties in the US. Below we see a histogram of this data. Each box is a county, the year they experienced their worst month is labeled in the box, along with the name of the county and the COVID deaths per 100K population in that worst month. The box is colored by month of year (hoping to express a seasonality view).
Summary
Of the 50 largest counties, the worst month for 30 of them fell between 15-45 COVID deaths/100K
The 7 worst county/months were all in April 2020 and 6 of the 7 being counties in NY. The 7th being Wayne County, MI (Detroit) 🤔
The worst month outside of those 7 was Los Angeles in January 2021. LA reported 77.2 COVID Deaths/100K that month.
Bronx County, NY reported nearly 3X as many deaths in April 2020 as LA did in their worst month.
- is definitely right to dig here…. there’s no chance NY could have been so different than every other urban area of the county.
Well, my guess is they maxed out their ventilator usage, maximizing deaths.
Check out the work of Mongol who does a great job refuting Jessica's claims.
NYC wasn't exactly the massive outlier she is claiming.
https://sars2.net/nopandemic.html#Claim_that_the_spike_in_deaths_in_NYC_in_spring_2020_was_so_sharp_that_it_could_not_have_been_caused_by_a_virus
https://sars2.net/nopandemic.html#Claim_that_Bergamo_was_the_only_location_which_had_higher_weekly_excess_mortality_than_NYC
https://sars2.net/nopandemic.html#Other_US_counties_with_high_excess_deaths_per_capita_in_2020