12/11/2023 0 Comments Unavowed deathsArmy veteran Daniel Wilkinson died due to gallstone pancreatitis, a treatable illness, because there were no ICU beds available. Last month, just outside of Houston, U.S. As emergency rooms become overcrowded, as beds fill up and as hospital systems strain under the pressure of COVID-19 outbreaks, more and more Americans put off seeking treatment for other medical conditions - or are unable to see a doctor - until it’s too late. Rice humanities computing researcher John Mulligan created the COVID excess mortality dashboard to help visualize long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.Īlso implicated in this widespread undercount are rampant problems within the American health care system and public health programs. “Do you want to add that to the number of COVID deaths your nursing home has on the books? That sort of thing starts to shade into the more unsavory implications of the undercount.” A couple of weeks later, that patient might die. Take, for instance, the well-documented surge in Alzheimer’s deaths in the early months of the pandemic, “pointing to how the coronavirus pandemic has exacted a higher fatality toll than official numbers have shown,” the Washington Post reported.įor example, a nursing home patient with Alzheimer’s might recover from COVID-19, but lose the sense of taste or smell. Mulligan’s dashboard, developed in partnership between Rice’s Center for Research Computing and the Medical Futures Lab, shows this ongoing crisis unfolding in stark detail. These excess deaths represent a large, looming and mostly unaddressed public health crisis, especially as recent spikes in rates of positive cases show the pandemic is simply not over. “You get rid of COVID deaths, and we are still well above the average.” “This is not a normal year,” Mulligan said. Ongoing studies indicate the number of people who would not have died in any other year has been undercounted by 20% to 36%. Since last year, the Journal of the American Medical Association and other publications have warned that official counts are underestimating the number of deaths associated with the pandemic. Instead, 60,264 Texans died of these afflictions during this time, about 7,500 more than would have been expected in a non-pandemic year. Explore the full dashboard at In Texas, for example, when you tally the number of people who died of heart disease or hypertension between December 2019 and August 2021, you would expect to see about 53,000 total deaths, based on the average from previous years’ CDC data.
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