Washington (AFP)

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused at least 122,000 more deaths in the United States than in a normal year, or 18% more, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Jama Internal Medicine.

But this is only a national average: the excess mortality was exceptional in large homes in the spring, starting with New York: the city buried three times more people than normal, and up to seven times more at the peak of the epidemic, according to this week-by-week analysis led by researchers at Yale University.

In New York, the expected number of deaths, according to a demographic model based on previous years, was 13,000 in a three-month period, from March to May. But 38,170 deaths were recorded.

In addition, during the entire first phase of the pandemic in the United States, the official toll of the Covid-19 was largely underestimated, statistics show.

The total number of additional deaths was much higher than the number of deaths officially attributed to Covid-19, because many deaths were not tested, or because the way of completing death certificates was not harmonized in the country . A total of 22% of the excess mortality was unrelated to the coronavirus.

States like Texas and Arizona, relatively little affected in the spring (but today the most active centers of the new outbreak), were the worst in this respect: more than half of the excess mortality was unexplained, without official link with the Covid-19.

But the gap has narrowed as the testing shortage has narrowed in the United States.

"The gap between the official Covid-19 balance sheet and total excess mortality has narrowed over time, and has almost disappeared in places like New York City. But the reliability of the official balance sheet still varies considerably between states," said AFP Daniel Weinberger of Yale School of Public Health, the first author of the study.

The official death toll from the Covid-19 is therefore relatively reliable in New York, Massachusetts or Minnesota, for example.

This work does not address the question of indirect deaths from the pandemic: people who died from another cause (heart attack, stroke ...) and who avoided going to the emergency room for fear of being contaminated with coronavirus. Figures show that these causes of death have increased, but Daniel Weinberger does not think this is very important in total excess mortality.

© 2020 AFP