Beautiful article. It should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it that if you try to specifically count all the people who died at “low”, whatever low, you will be low. For most things, you will be very, very low.
What most people seem involuntary is that for the flu, the CDC alone is able to identify about 5,000 deaths per year as real flu stars. They know that counting is low, so at the end of the year they adjust the count by a correction factor. For the flu, the correction factor is usually about five or a little more, so the turn the 5,000 dead they actually identified into 25,000.
For Covid, they have so far identified 165,000 dead. At the end of the flu season, next April, they will look back and estimate the undercounting for Covid, and estimate an adjustment. Based on the data so far, I expect this factor to come out around 1.2-1.3. That would mean that the current death toll of 165,000 would end up at 198-214,000.
The normal flu does most of the killing in the December-March time frame, a year after it first appears. I think Covid will be flatter than that, and instead of having a big peak from December to March, it will remain relatively constant throughout the winter. If we continue to see an average of 1,200 people die per day by March 31, 2021, that would be another 300,000 people, bringing the total count to about 465,000. With a correction factor of 1.25, that would be 581,000 deaths, almost like the flu. Oh wait, nice like the flu times 20.
