Thoughts on IHME “Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19”

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2021-05-26 07:30:04

These are some thoughts and questions about the IHME study of excess mortality published on May 6th. Originally posted on Twitter, so wording is very straightforward, I modified it a bit for an article format.

The main result of IHME’s analysis is that global excess deaths are 2-2.5 times higher than reported COVID deaths is probably true, though this might a lower bound as well. What worries me is the details that they have shared, which show that their excess estimates are wildly out of bounds of anything we know, even though data should be identical, and that they have very little actual data to work with.

On May 9th, IHME incorporated their excess death estimate to their COVID-19 interactive trackers. This allows me to inspect their results directly without trying to “eye-ball” their maps and figures. Article has been updated accordingly.

They state their data comes from “56 countries and 198 subnational units have reported either weekly or monthly deaths from all causes for parts of 2020 and for prior years.” But where is that data? The references they list only include some National Statistics Offices (NSOs), hardly 56. Moreover, are the sub-national data from these same countries or separate? In one of the videos explaining these estimates, they state that sub-national data is “US states, Canadian Provinces, Mexican states, etc.” so the answer is prob. That there is significant overlap between the national and sub-national data.

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