Taiwan has reported extremely hard to believe COVID-19 death numbers with a total of seven (7) deaths. This in a country just off the coast of China with close ties to China (Foxconn, the giant manufacturer of iPhones and other popular gadgets is actually a Taiwanese company, for example).
It is worth recalling that huge numbers of (mostly elderly) people die from influenza and pneumonia each year. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) attributed 55,672 deaths in 2017 to pneumonia and influenza in the leading causes of deaths report while statistics on the CDC’s FluView web site actually attribute just over 188,000 deaths in 2017 to pneumonia and influenza, a difference of over three times — and a number that still exceeds the total reported number of deaths (135,991) from COVID-19 in the United States as of July 15, 2020. Thus it is very unclear how many people die from pneumonia and influenza in the United States — never mind Taiwan or other nations.
Again, the current cumulative total of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) deaths in the United States according to the CDC is 135,991 which is substantially less than the just over 188,000 deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza in 2017 according to the CDC’s FluView web site.
In the absence of testing, COVID-19 deaths would probably be classified as pneumonia cases.
Links: For example, an NCHS data file from the FluView web site with the just over 188,000 deaths from pneumonia and influenza is: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2019-2020/data/NCHSData14.csv
The weekly pneumonia and influenza deaths page/section is: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2
The FluView sub-page is: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html
The Final Deaths Report for 2017 is: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf
See Table B on page six(6) with the leading causes of death. See item 8 “influenza and pneumonia” giving 55,672 deaths from “influenza and pneumonia.”
(C) 2020 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.
About Me
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).