All-Cause Versus Covid-19 Mortality: Why I Also Care About Other Diseases Too
What are pandemics and epidemics?
All-cause mortality is defined as all of the causes of death combined and is generally steady at around 52000/month in the USA. Epidemics by nature appear suddenly, rapidly spread between people, reach a high frequency, and then subside. Pandemics are geographically widespread epidemics. During epidemics, all-cause mortality will rise accordingly. In the example below, the 100,000 deaths from the epidemic are added to the usual 50,000 deaths from all other causes, giving a total of 150,000 deaths for the peak month. As the epidemic abates, the all-cause mortality will start to reflect normal behavior. When the Covid-19 pandemic is over, I will be curious to see if the all-cause mortality is higher than usual when compared to previous years. If the average is normal, I assume that the deaths from the coronavirus only killed those who would have died from other ailments anyway. Death is terrible and no less tragic if it did not come from the coronavirus. If the overall average is higher, Covid-19 is most likely to blame.
Since I spend several hours each week reading scientific papers, digesting statistics, and practicing in the healthcare profession, I have a solid perspective on the realities of our overall health status. The statistics tell a grim story. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer, obesity, and Alzheimer’s disease are killing too many people and are increasingly deadly with age.
The recent Covid-19 has captivated the general public’s attention to disease and death. Sadly, numerous conditions are killing us. Keep in mind that all illness and death are horrible. I am in no way diminishing the suffering due to the coronavirus. I also don’t mean to cause any further panic, but the latest statistics from the CDC’s website proves that we have more to deal with than just the Coronavirus pandemic.
Caveat
They warn that the “data during this period are incomplete because of the lag in time between when the death occurred and when the death certificate is completed, submitted to NCHS, and processed for reporting purposes. This delay can range from 1 week to 8 weeks or more, depending on the jurisdiction, age, and cause of death”. They don’t bother to breakdown all the causes, only pneumonia, flu, and covid-19. They also state that the Covid-19 numbers are either confirmed or presumed COVID-19; therefore, the accuracy is questionable. Reliable data is never “presumed”; it is not proper science to use false data. They also say that the flu deaths could have also had pneumonia and Covid-19. Since the current data is the best we have at the moment, I think it is worth a look.
Below is the raw data from the CDC. In this table, the CDC has a column labeled death from all causes. The column labeled percent of expected deaths relies on the average of the last two years during the same week. Notice that pneumonia is a consistent killer of over 3500 people weekly. Let’s assume that the Covid-19 numbers will increase ten-fold. All-cause mortality would still be a much larger number than Covid-19.
CDC April 10, 2020
The first week of February had no coronavirus deaths, but we had almost 57000 deaths anyway. Did you notice? I guess that most of you did not. Did the government notice? If they did, they remained silent about it. I can say the same for the CDC and WHO. The good news is that, according to the CDC this week, the all-cause rate is falling rapidly, even as Covid-19 deaths rise. In other words, we are focusing on Covid-19 deaths with horror as almost 17,000 fewer people overall have died in the last two weeks! They show that we are at 58% of the deaths compared with the average from the previous two years. This is good news, if true. The last time I checked, less death is better than more death. I have placed those trends on a graph below for easier visualization. The yellow and gray trends are mine and hypothetical. My rationale is that I wanted to show even if the pandemic is ten times worse, all-cause mortality is still a major problem.
The CDC also breaks down the same statistics over the same period by age. The number of all-cause deaths for babies under one seems large, but it is only 65% of the expected rate. Happily, no babies have died of Covid-19. The rate of all-cause and covid-19 mortality rises by age.
I have placed them on a bar graph below for easier visualization. I have taken the liberty to put hypothetical data in yellow and gray. The hypothetical data illustrates Covid-19 mortality that is five times and ten times worse than the current CDC estimations. Notice that even in the older age groups, the blue (gray and yellow) portion of the bars is tiny compared to the orange. As we can see, many things are killing us, not just Covid-19. Why do we not pay attention to this? I don’t have an answer.
“I study the health trends for a living, so I know things have been grim for quite some time, and it is getting worse. Let’s not get down about this trend. I have known what most people seem to be learning lately: people are sick and dying. The number of people we hear about that are suffering and dying from Covid-19 is scary. What about all the other things killing us? We have shut down the world because of the blue portion of the graph. We are all doing everything we can to avoid getting the virus. When we stop the virus and get rid of the blue part of the bar graph, will it look much different? Not really. ”
Now that we know that there are other diseases diminishing our quality of life and killing us, lets take action against them too.
Why are we so willing to do everything we are doing to shrink the blue part of the bar graph but ignore the considerable orange portion? We should be every bit as concerned with shrinking the orange part too. The good news is that we don’t have to shut down society and all lose our jobs to do it. 90% of the things killing us are preventable through lifestyle changes. Adequate sleep, nutrient-dense paleo-type diets devoid of processed carbohydrates, proper movement, stress management, and healthy relationships are some of the critical components of health. If you are wondering about the steps you can take to improve your health, start here.