Rate of deaths for COVID-19 has fallen

The claim: “Cases up only because of our big number testing. Mortality rate way down!!!” — President Donald Trump.

Trump made two statements in the June 23 tweet; PolitiFact found the testing claim false in a separate fact check. This check analyzes the mortality rate claim.

PolitiFact ruling: Mostly True. This is one of the few coronavirus measurements that Trump can point to with optimism. The number of deaths has remained a bit below 600 per day in mid-to-late June, but that’s more than two-thirds lower than the peak of about 2,000 daily deaths in late April. The number of coronavirus deaths per day has continued to fall in June even as the number of cases has risen.

Trump’s statement is accurate for now, though it’s too soon to know whether the recent rise in new cases will produce an uptick in deaths by early July. Discussion: Epidemiologists say that because of wide variations in testing patterns, the data doesn’t offer a clear look at how likely someone is to die from the virus if they are infected with it. Gaps in testing leave too many undiagnosed cases to reliably determine a person’s likelihood of dying from the coronavirus, much less whether the likelihood of dying has risen or fallen over time.

Instead, researchers say, the most solid metric for assessing Trump’s statement is the number of new coronavirus deaths reported per day.

The number of daily deaths from the coronavirus has been falling consistently since peaking in late April. In fact, even as infections have risen since early June, deaths have not.

At the peak in late April, more than 2,000 were dying from the coronavirus on a typical day. In late June, it’s less than 600. That’s still a large number of deaths every day. All told, roughly 115,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 to date.

The White House said the per capita number of deaths in the United States is also lower than it is in several industrialized countries in Europe that were hard hit by the virus. According to Johns Hopkins University, the number of coronavirus deaths

per 100,000 population is about 37 for the U.S., compared with 65 in the United Kingdom, 61 in Spain and 57 in Italy.

But other European countries have lower death rates for COVID-19 than the U.S. does, including the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark.

So why are deaths falling? There may be several reasons, and for now, they’re somewhat speculative.

One possibility is that the initial wave of infections disproportionately reached more patients with weaker immune systems, including those in nursing homes, or more vulnerable Americans who hadn’t yet taken up effective social distancing. By contrast, more recent waves of infections may be reaching youncrop

ger and healthier people who are better able to survive an infection.

Another possibility is that we’re “getting better at treatment and keeping people alive,” said Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University’s College of Public Health.

Still, epidemiologists caution that deaths are a lagging indicator. The disease often takes two to three weeks to run its course, meaning that one day’s

of new infections tends to drive the deaths that occur two to three weeks later.

“We might not expect an increase in the death rate until approximately 21 days from when we started to see an increase in cases,” said Brooke Nichols, an infectious disease modeler at the Boston University School of Public Health.

So far, the age breakdown for deaths has been fairly consistent — people older than 65 accounted for 81 percent of coronavirus deaths at the mortality peak in mid-April, and that group still accounted for 82 percent of deaths in mid-June, a time when the total number of deaths had fallen significantly, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Since we’re about two weeks into the national rise in infections, scientists will be watching to see if deaths start increasing this week.