The media is ignoring COVID-19 death rates. "Cause-specific mortality" is now the focus.

Last night during the VP debate, the first question posed to Mike Pence involved the amount of COVID-19 deaths in America relative to other countries. But this wasn't presented within the context of a "death rate", or more specifically, the case-fatality rate. Rather, the amount of deaths was presented within the context of what epidemiologists refer to as the cause-specific mortality rate, or "crude" mortality rate.

Here was the question -

quote:

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More than 210,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 since February. The US death toll as a percentage of our population is higher than that of almost every other wealthy nation on Earth. For instance, our death rate is 2.5x that of Canada next door. You head the administrations Coronavirus task force, why is the US death toll, as a percentage of our population, higher than that of almost every other wealthy country?

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The moderator here actually made a mistake by using the words "death rate", because the rate of death in the USA is much lower than Candada's (as explained below).

Most people who hear this question won't be statistically savvy enough to break this down (including post-game commentators on channels like CNN, either due to ignorance or design). Most people will simply interpret this question as "Why are more people dying at a higher rate of COVID in the USA than anywhere else in the developed world?" Sounds bad. And it's why the media keeps using the cause-specific mortality rate rather than the general death rate. So what's the difference?

The death rate, or case-fatality rate, is what it sounds like - how many people that have been diagnosed with something end up dying from that ailment. With coronavirus, we're looking at the amount of people that have been diagnosed within a given geographical area (countries, in this case), and then looking at the percentage of those who are diagnosed that end up dying. This makes sense, and it's how we contextualize medical deaths for every other ailment - when we look at, say, lung cancer, we want to know how many people that are diagnosed with lung cancer each year end up dying. Same with diabetes, heart disease, and other medical conditions. Of those who have this condition, how many end up dying?

That's not the metric the media, or last night's moderator, are currently focusing on. They're actually ignoring the case-fatality rate (for reasons you'll see below), and continually focus on cause-specific mortality. This is calculated by taking the total amount of people that have died from a given cause, and then dividing that amount by the total amount of people within a given area (ie, a country), and then standardizing the value by multiplying by 1,000 or 100,000. For example, we have about 211,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States and a total population of 330 million. (211,000/330 million) x 100,000 gives us 64 deaths per 100,000 people.

This is what the moderator was referring to last night -





Here's the problem - as you've probably already figured out, using cause specific mortality (deaths per 100k population) tells you nothing about how a given country is handling COVID-19. It's nothing more than a general indicator, and tells you nothing about the performance of each country in controlling deaths.

For example, if I told you that 35 people per 100k in France died each year from lung cancer, relative to just 12 in the USA, your first question would be " Yeah, but what are the smoking rates for each country?" Because the smoking rate would obviously be a main determinant of how many people would be dying each from lung cancer within a given country, but that's not apparent when looking at the cause-specific mortality rate. Same with age.

You absolutely have to adjust for underlying age differences and other variables in order to further weigh these data - and none of that is provided by looking at cause-specific mortality.

It can also be distorted simply based on the sheer number of cases. Let's say that 150 million people have contracted COVID-19 in the USA, but still only 211,000 people have died. That sounds pretty good, as that means you have a death rate of 0.14%, which is nothing. And yet the cause-specific mortality rate would still be the same, because it's not looking at how well you can treat those that are infected, it's simply measuring the amount of people that have died relative to the total population.

So why is the media not focusing on the actual death rate of COVID-19 in this country, but rather on a much more generalized and imprecise metric like cause-specific mortality? Simple...because the USA has a lower rate of death from COVID-19 than many other first world developed nations, including Canada, Australia, France, and others -








Canada, United Kingdom, Sweden, France, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain, Romania, Switzerland, Australia, Germany, and Finaland ALL have higher COVID-19 death rates than the USA.

In the UK, the statistical likelihood of dying from COVID-19 is a staggering 7.8%, relative to just 2.8% in the USA. In Canada, it's 5.5%, almost double the rate of dying from COVID-19 the USA. These are the socialized medicine paradigms that the left celebrates, yet no one seems to want to directly compare the COVID-19 fatality rates of the USA to these other countries. Now you know why.

This is why the standard death rate of COVID-19 isn't discussed. It's because the USA's rate of death is significantly below that of many other first world developed nations.

All data comes directly from Johns Hopkins database, which is updated regularly.