An estimated 8,788 people died of the coronavirus in the United States over the past seven days, according to official figures. That’s significantly worse than the worst week of flu mortality going back to at least 2013.
And consider that next week will be worse and the following week still worse.
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So if you still insist on saying this is equivalent to a bad flu season, then brace yourself for the body count in April.
As of 4 p.m. on March 31, 3,746 U.S. deaths had been attributed to the coronavirus, according to the data at COVIDtracking.com. At close of business yesterday, the number was up to 12,671. That means that in the first seven days of April (more or less), 8,875 people died of the coronavirus.
I went back and looked for the worst single week of flu deaths in the U.S. Keep in mind that when we count flu deaths, we add together deaths attributed to flu with those attributed to pneumonia. As far as I can find, the most lethal week of the flu in the U.S. was the third week of January 2018, when 7,038 deaths could be attributed to the flu or pneumonia.
The coronavirus was 25% more deadly last week than the worst flu week in recent history.
And it’s getting worse.
That’s the chart of daily deaths in the U.S. attributed to the coronavirus. Some days are less deadly than the day before, but most days are more deadly than the day before. More importantly, every week is more deadly than the week before.
Look at New York City’s past to see our future. There, the daily hospitalizations from coronavirus exceed the worst weekly hospitalizations from the flu.
A quick note: I know that some people don’t trust coronavirus death numbers because those numbers include basically everyone diagnosed with coronavirus who died. If you have a heart attack and you also had coronavirus, it’s counted as a coronavirus death.
There’s a lot to say about that, but it’s mathematically unavoidable that this virus is causing massive numbers of deaths. Yesterday, I wrote about how the daily death total in New York City in April has far exceeded its daily average for any previous April. Since then, the numbers have gotten far, far worse.
In New York City, the average for April is now 280 COVID-19 deaths a day. Even if you try to attribute every one of those deaths to some underlying condition, heart disease, lung disease, being really old, et cetera, you now have a daily death toll in New York City that’s nearly twice the normal for April. And people are still dying from other things, even if at a lower rate than in a normal April.
In short, if you want to think of this plague as simply a bad flu season, then it’s just become the most lethal flu ever — and it’s getting worse.
