Tracking US Deaths versus Deaths in the Healthy

Much is made in official pronouncements as well as in the media about how much increased risk of severe illness and death there is from people who have pre-existing medical conditions if they also contract swine flu. That might be true with seasonal human influenzaviruses. Problem is, this is not a human influenzavirus.

In the US, seasonal influenza is said to kill 36,000 people every year (need source), of which roughly 90% are elderly. It is already borne out by the CDC and the WHO that deaths from swine flu are much higher in the young category than is typical in flu season.

Data from the US also show an increase in deaths from the healthy. I have put together a Google spreadsheet tracking US deaths over time as well as the percentage of total deaths that are in people who do not have underlying medical conditions.

There are some problems with this. I used as the source for my data a different spreadsheet mentioned in a thread on flutrackers.com. (link to original needed) It seems rather complete. The issue is that firm death dates are not given. When no death date was given I tried to use the lag time from other reports from that state to determine where to set a death date. If I couldn't make a determination, I made an assumption of 3-4 days lag. So other people might come up with slightly different graphs, but the trend and final number should be a good match.

To determine if a person was healthy I looked at the remarks. A null comment is assumed to be healthy. If an underlying condition is marked disputed I assumed a healthy individual. Given the risks of pregnancy in this pandemic I assumed pregnancy to be a valid underlying condition.

Here is my spreadsheet:


And here is a chart showing the increase in the death rate in healthy individuals:



There is clearly an upward trend, and we may soon break 50% of all US deaths being from healthy individuals. It is probably true that an elderly person (who is most at risk from seasonal flu) has one or more underlying conditions, so the deaths that made up that graph are probably in young and middle aged people.