Might be that deaths are being classified a bit differently now too. Just looking at https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Counts-of-Deaths-by-State-and-Select-Causes/muzy-jte6/data for the national level numbers/trend for “Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified (R00-R99)” look different from last year. I also heard someone claim that something of a spike in pneumonia deaths is happening but didn’t really see that in the data.
But I would also think some marginal improvement in treating patients and keeping them alive has occurred as well.
Might be that deaths are being classified a bit differently now too. Just looking at https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Counts-of-Deaths-by-State-and-Select-Causes/muzy-jte6/data for the national level numbers/trend for “Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified (R00-R99)” look different from last year. I also heard someone claim that something of a spike in pneumonia deaths is happening but didn’t really see that in the data.
But I would also think some marginal improvement in treating patients and keeping them alive has occurred as well.