Impact of virus deaths in New York

The Covid-19 pandemic has been traumatic for New York City. How traumatic, by historical standards? Well, city health authorities started keeping more or less consistent track of deaths in 1804. Every year, the city Department
of Health and Mental Hygiene publishes a remarkable chart on the cover of its vital statistics report of mortality rates since then, labeled “The Conquest of Pestilence in New York City.” Although the full report for 2020 won’t be ready for a couple of years, there’s enough data available now to estimate how Covid-19 might rank among the pestilences that have beset the city through the centuries.
OK, so it’s not cholera. But it’s clearly the worst thing to hit New York City in a long, long time — and that’s assuming the city’s epidemic is more or less over. I estimated 2020 numbers by taking total deaths in the city through August 1, as reported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and assuming that deaths for the rest of the year will equal the August-December average from 2017, 2018 and 2019. This results in an estimated death toll of 81,524 for the full year, about 27,000 more than the 2017-2019 average. That excess-deaths estimate is more than the 23,641 deaths that the city health department has so far attributed to Covid-19, reflecting some mix of missed Covid cases, deaths from other causes that can be ascribed to the pandemic and the countermeasures taken against it, and random variation. To calculate the mortality rate, I assumed that the city’s population declined from 2019 to 2020 at the same rate that it has (according to the Census Bureau’s annual estimates) since hitting an all-time peak in 2017. Anecdotal reports of pandemic-related departures from New York indicate that it has probably declined by more than that, and for this and other reasons I expect that my estimate of 9.9 deaths-per-thousand for 2020 will turn out to be an underestimate. But I wanted to err on the side of conservatism.
One other note about the data behind the chart: It’s available back to 1936 from online city vital statistics
reports. But after trying and failing to get the city health department to send me older annual data, I owe the rest of the numbers to the work of Rutgers University at Newark economist Jason M Barr, who offers a guide for where to find them all.
There are multiple ways to place the projected 2020 death toll in historical context. The 81,524 deaths would fall short of the city record of 91,169 set in 1968, and 9.9 deaths per thousand would merely put the mortality rate back about where it was in the early 1990s. One has to go much further back, though — to the influenza pandemic of 1918 — to find an increase in mortality from the previous year as big as my 2020 estimate of 3.4 deaths per thousand.
One factor complicating such comparisons is that Covid-19 has been deadliest for the elderly, which wasn’t always true for past epidemics. In 1918, 75% of the deaths attributed to influenza and pneumonia in New York City were among those 39 and younger; in 2020, only 4% of the city’s Covid-19 fatalities have been 44 or younger.

—Bloomberg