A: By some measures, yes it is.
When one of your friendly resident Nerdy Girls saw this tweet from Andy Slavitt earlier today: “The daily CV death toll has surpassed everything else,” she wondered, can this possibly be true?
Well, it turns out that over the past few weeks, COVID-19 has charged up the list of the Top 15 causes of death in the US *by day*. (Click the link below for a terrific animation of these data from Robert Martin posted on Flourish.)
Where COVID-19 ends up on the list of Top 15 causes of death for all of 2020 will of course depend on what the next several weeks and months look like. How high will our peak be? How long will a plateau last? Will there be a second surge of cases and if so, how lethal?
One super-nerd fine-print caveat: We also have to think about “competing risks” when we look at mortality data. That is, some of the COVID-19 deaths that we are seeing now are people that sadly would have also died this year but from another cause.
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