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It's amazing how often death toll related to COVID-19 is taken in a vacuum. From all the little evidence we get (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/well/live/coronavirus-doc...), it seems that heart disease related deaths are reduced, or rather "swallowed" by the coronavirus deaths (in US alone, 650k people die of heart-related diseases every year, or more than 50k a month).

To me, the explanation is logical — some who would have died of a heart disease anyway are now dying of COVID19.

I do not want to dispute that it is having an effect — I just want to know what that effect is. Is it 20% more deaths? Or 4x (300%) more?

Considering heart related diseases have been mostly linked to COVID19 deaths, I am surprised nobody is looking at aggregated data yet, which would help more "accurately" estimate the death toll.

FWIW, I look at US data as a good proxy for what happens if you do not institute a full lockdown or strict social distancing rules only for the first full month with roughly 50k deaths. Assuming there was no decrease in heart-related deaths (up to 55k), that suggests that the effect is at worst 100% increase (doubling).

I suspect that it's lower than that since there's bound to be an overlap, but that's still a big range (though it can also be negative since at-risk patients might get early care due to the panic, but that would be surprising).

> "... there was high confidence (99 percent) the expected [US] death toll would be between 66,055 and 70,304."
Nah. There are so many possible unknown events, like patient 31 in Korea, if people will go to the beach when there is a sunny day, if people will crow in front of the banks in case of a bank run [1], when will the class start, will planes keep flying, ...

Note that the paper says:

> The new model predicts that the maximum total number of deaths will be approximately 62,100 across the United States due to the Covid-19 virus, and with a 95% confidence that the expected total death toll will be between 60,951 and 63,249 deaths based on the data until 22 April, 2020.

When the intervals calculated with a high confidence at different day don't overlap, it's a huge red flag.

For a more realistic interval, the paper also says:

> On 17 April, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics Evaluation (IHME) projected that there would be 60,308 Covid-19 deaths with an estimated range between 34,063 and 140,381 deaths by 4 August, which is down from 68,841 as predicted earlier on 13 April.

[1] we have something like this in Argentina, not a bank run, but something similar.