What is going on? After shutting down the government and killing the greatest economy in the world by specialists on the coronavirus, the data is not so clear.

Corrected: This article has been updated and corrected to reflect that the data used in the post was the most accurate data at the time the post was published. The data from report(s) referenced, however, was not complete at the time of publication. There is a delay in data as a function of how the NCHS records initial reports on mortality vs the verification of the cause of death. It is also used as an estimation in their regressions to determine how reliable their predictions are. Thus, strictly speaking, they can make predictions for modeling purposes, but do not report actual percentage of complete data.

This article makes no claims or predictions about rates of infection, rates of hospitalizations, or any claims on therapeutics (such as HQL.)

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According to data obtained from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics Mortality Surveillance System website, total U.S. deaths for the first three weeks of March are DOWN 10% from the average of the prior four years for the same three week period. The average for weeks 9 through 11 for the four prior years was a total of 170,555 deaths. For weeks 9 through 11 this year, the total is 153,015, meaning 17,540 fewer people died in America during the first three weeks of March than could be reasonably expected. And the gap between historic deaths and weekly deaths is widening. For week 11, just 47,655 Americans died, 8,773 and 15% fewer than the average for week 11 in the prior four years. And while data on week 12 is not complete, it is trending similar to week 11 and will likely be down by 15% (around 8,700 deaths less than expected) even though 1,919 COVID-19 deaths were reported (in week beginning 3/22).

According to the CDC’s website, in March 2020 there were a total of 193,000 deaths in the US.

What is really going on?

Additional Updates:

The data used in this article is publicly available at the CDC/NCHS, https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html

The “Season” is established by the CDC to begin at week 40 within the Calendar year

The NCHS updating process introduces negligible increases after about 6 weeks

The percentage (or proportion) increase in Total Mortality is not much higher than what was seen in the most recent ‘bad flu season’ of 2017-18. By historical standards, we are above the 1968 flu level, or about a 5% uptick in total mortality year-over-year

The authors of this post are Dr. Richard Cross, PhD and Joe Hoft, MBA, CPA, CISA and author at thegatewaypundit.com. Dr. Cross spent his career dealing in numbers and studies on various projects. Mr. Hoft spent his career overseeing the financial reporting and auditing of billion dollar entities worldwide. Mr. Hoft currently resides in Hong Kong.