nwspmp said:nought said:
The posts above got me thinking about numbers. The news reports about various places bringing in refrigerated trucks made me go hmmmmm.
According to the CDC, for 2018, there were 202,205 deaths in Texas. See https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/provisional-tables.htm
That's an average of 553.5 deaths a day.
Yesterday we had a "state-record high" COVID-19-related deaths of 129: https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2020/07/16/texas-reports-highest-death-toll-scoronavirus-pandemic/
You can draw your own conclusions about the reported inability of morgues to keep up with the "overwhelming" number of COVID-19 deaths.
Well, people haven't stopped dying of other things too. If we are generous, an extra 20% of deaths could easily warrant an expansion of storage needed. I worked in a funeral home once. They had on site cold storage for four bodies. 20% expansion would need external storage.
Here's a CDC report I saw last week that tries to model the excess deaths from COVID-19. Haven't really reviewed the methodology, but it seems to be trying to answer the number of excess deaths question rationally. You can filter by state to see numbers for Texas.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
By those graphs, we are probably reaching the 20% in state now. Of course, we'll see what happens post pandemic (i.e., will we drop below the expected rate for a while? I don't know).
Oh, and look at the 2017/2018 flu season, which was last time we went statistically above the norm.
