Still can’t get to the Johns Hopkins site to do my weekly update. Not sure why.
In the meantime, let me briefly address the issue of excess deaths in China, as that was not discussed in the Economist article.
An article of interest: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-02-deaths-china-covid-outbreak.html
Also see: https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/372/bmj.n415.full.pdf
Main points:
- This only looked at 1 January to 31 March 2020
- Overall deaths did not increase for most of China.
- Excess deaths were in Wuhan were 412 per 100,000.
- Or, to convert this to a meaningful number, population of the urban area of Wuhan in 2018 was 8,896,900.
- Population of the Prefecture is 11,081,000 in 2018.
- Population of the Metro area is 19 million.
- Therefore, excess deaths are at least 36,655 depending on which population is used.
- Or, to convert this to a meaningful number, population of the urban area of Wuhan in 2018 was 8,896,900.
- Outside of Wuhan city, the overall death rate was slightly lower. This is probably related to the lockdown.
I have not seen excess deaths calculations for all of China or excess death calculations after 31 March 2020. China reported as of last week 4,848 deaths. This is probably undercounted. The actual number of deaths in China from Coronavirus is probably in the tens of thousands and may exceed a hundred thousand. I have not seen evidence indicating that it is worse than that.