Business media blasted this headline today: "The Treasury sent $1.4 billion stimulus money to 1.1 million dead people." (For example, this BusinessInsider article).
This sent me looking for U.S. death statistics, and to this CDC webpage.
Annually about 3 million Americans die for all kinds of reasons. For a rough calculation, I assume deaths are evenly spread out over the year so about 250,000 per month. The GAO study covered April and May, two months. About 0.5 million people died during those two months. Since the Treasury can't know who will die in advance, these payments will eventually show up as paid to the dead.
Death records are not immediately available to authorities. The CDC webpage that had full mortality statistics for 2017 was published only in mid 2019. If reported deaths are lagged by 4 to 5 months, in other words, if the Treasury used data from even 6 months ago, this delay accounts for the entirety of the payments that went to "dead" people. It is inevitable that some small percent of stimulus money will be paid to the dead.
There is fraud involved too, certainly, but probably a minority of the headlined amount. (Even though BusinessInsider called this a "significant portion" at the start of the article for clickbait, by the end of the article, you learn that the $1.4 billion is 0.5% of the total payments, which they unironically describe as "a slither".)
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That's potential fraud by the little people. What about fraud by businesses? For example, did anyone look at how many companies took out PPP loans that subsequently declare bankruptcy? This is just one of many possible ways to milk stimulus money.
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Here is another thing I learned while reading those death statistics. Out of the roughly 3 million who died in 2017, 56,000 died from "influenza and pneumonia". The U.S. death toll from Covid-19 today already exceeds 122,000, more than double that number. The Covid-19 count doesn't include deaths from influenza and pneumonia this year. Without counting any deaths between now and end of year, Covid-19 is already the 6th leading cause of death (referencing the 2017 ranking). So we are facing a public health crisis.
The number of deaths is the mortality rate multiplied by the number of infected. The mortality rate is being revised down because of undetected cases. Any revision is guesswork since if we really knew who's undetected, those people would have been placed in the confirmed category!
The researchers who bump up the number of cases to claim a lower mortality rate should realize that when you bump up the number of cases, you're enlarging the base of the infected. If the death rate is as low as the flu, then the number of infected must be much higher to attain double the number of deaths.
If you take the adjusted mortality rate and the unadjusted infection rate, the numbers don't work out. You undercount deaths. That's because the inclusion of undetected cases simultaneously affects mortality rate as well as infection rate. It's been argued that if Covid-19's death rate is just like the flu, we should treat it as nothing special. The problem is the rate of infection, which leads to more than double the number of deaths, even at the same rate of death. Thus, we need policies and behaviors that clamp down the infection rate.
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