The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) has changed its reporting for the COVID-19 death toll. They will no longer use officially reported numbers, which are subject to various errors including outright lies; instead, they calculate the COVID-19 death toll using reported total deaths and other factors.
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Their calculation is that the United States has experienced 905,000 COVID-19 deaths vice the CDC reported total of 574,000. To make these calculations, they applied models that they’ve been using for other diseases for 30 years.
These estimates are based on IHME’s long-standing methodology for measuring the burden of diseases on a global scale. Since 1990, the Global Burden of Disease study has measured the total human cost of diseases.
IHME estimated total COVID-19 deaths by comparing anticipated deaths from all causes based on pre-pandemic trends with the actual number of all-cause deaths during the pandemic. This “excess mortality” figure was then adjusted to remove deaths indirectly attributable to the pandemic (for example, due to people with non-COVID conditions avoiding health care facilities) as well as deaths averted by the pandemic (for example, declines in traffic deaths due to lower mobility). The resulting adjusted estimates include only deaths directly due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19.