Coronavirus Information...who do you trust?

[Belsnickel]

One of the things I think is a good visualizer for this whole situation is the "excess deaths" chart from the CDC. Something a lot of people may not know is that we can estimate, with fairly reasonable accuracy, how many deaths we will see in the country based on past trends.



Here we have the trend of deaths going back to January 2017. The blue bars indicate the observed deaths. The yellow line is what we had as the predicted about, meaning anything beyond that is considered to be "excess" based upon the predictions. You can see that we're pretty good at this math. There is a little bump, noted with those red plus signs, for the 2017-2018 flu season which was particularly bad, but otherwise we stay below the threshold that is predicted. Then the pandemic hits. Data is still being compiled for the end of August and early September, so we will see how this goes, but you can see that we have been experiencing these "excess deaths" since late March. We're currently trending downward, so let's hope it stays that way.