Coronavirus Growth in Western Countries: April 26 Update

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through April 26. The question of the day is: Why am I using data from the COVID Tracking Project for recent US death tolls? What’s wrong with the Johns Hopkins data?

Nothing, really. But here’s the thing: everyone’s mortality data is probably wrong. Evidence from analysis of excess deaths—that is, the number of deaths each day this year compared to the same day last year—suggests that we’re counting COVID-19 deaths wrong. The actual death toll is probably 50 percent higher than the official numbers. Maybe more.

But that doesn’t matter too much when you’re looking at trendlines. As long as the counting method is wrong in a consistent way, you’re OK. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks ago New York City decided to adopt a new counting procedure and they suddenly added 3,700 new COVID-19 deaths to their previous toll. This wasn’t because more people had actually died. It was solely because they changed the way they count.

If you use the new number, you get a big, artificial spike in the overall US number that doesn’t represent anything real. So I decided that in order to keep the trendlines readable, I’d use the overall number from the COVID Tracking Project, which doesn’t include New York’s spike. That’s why my number is different from the one you see on the news every day.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The COVID Tracking Project is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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