Sorry, some confusion because the CDC shows data in the most infuriatingly obfuscating manner possible, and when I see a data set listed as flu/pneumonia deaths I assume the data is about flu/pneumonia deaths.
Anyway, your numbers do show the total deaths, but as I said, these would be underreported not-2020 years because a good portion of flu deaths occur in the last weeks of the year in normal years.
It's an misleading conclusion to claim that we're at 300,000+ more deaths this year especially because there is apparently no flu season in 2020. Right now our count is about 70k above 2019's total.
We really need to wait for the end of this year though to see the final numbers.
Sorry, some confusion because the CDC shows data in the most infuriatingly obfuscating manner possible, and when I see a data set listed as flu/pneumonia deaths I assume the data is about flu/pneumonia deaths.
Anyway, your numbers do show the total deaths, but as I said, these would be underreported not-2020 years because a good portion of flu deaths occur in the last weeks of the year in normal years.
It's an misleading conclusion to claim that we're at 300,000+ more deaths this year especially because there is apparently no flu season in 2020. Right now our count is about 70k above 2019's total.
We really need to wait for the end of this year though to see the final numbers.
Yeah, it was somewhat infuriating to find and pull the data I needed from that site :)
Fair enough, I agree that it would be best to compare full years, I'll revisit this after the year is over.