The Statue of Liberty is seen behind a refrigerated truck that serves as a temporary mortuary for coronavirus victims at the Southern Brooklyn Marine Terminal in New York City on May 25. Noam Galai / Getty Images
The number of people who die every day in the United States since the beginning of April is consistently more than 10% higher than in previous years, according to a new report from the Health Care Cost Institute in Washington.
This institution links the increase in daily deaths with the coronavirus pandemic.
The Health Cost Cost Institute, an independent nonprofit research organization, bases its report on data from the obituary for all deaths from any cause, not just Covid-19.
To better understand the number of daily deaths that occurred in the United States during the pandemic, researchers at the institute compared the number of daily deaths for each day of this year with the average number of deaths on a daily basis from 2014 to 2019. The estimates for daily deaths are reported at the level national and state, and for New York City.
“New York City, which is widely regarded as the center of a pandemic in the United States, has more than doubled daily deaths every day since the end of March,” the Institute of Health Care Cost noted on its website.
“In mid-April, we began to observe a decrease in daily deaths in areas such as New York and New Jersey; daily deaths continue to increase in other countries such as Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland,” the Institute for Health Care Costs said. . “We will continue to monitor this trend and many others because the data is updated every week.”
The institute’s new data, which is updated weekly, collects information about daily deaths in the United States using online obituaries from newspapers, funeral homes, online warnings, direct delivery, and other sources through a health data system called Datavant.
US health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tend to rely on death certificate data to track daily deaths.
Despite using a different primary source of mortality data, the Health Care Cost Institute says it likes results similar to the CDC’s estimates of excessive mortality.
“We hope that this analysis serves as a research resource for those who seek to better understand the effect of COVID-19 on all causes of death,” the agency said.
