13 Deaths in a Day: The 'Apocalyptic' Coronavirus Surge at Elmhurst Hospital

Was the Elmhurst Hospital Hype substantiated by its spring 2020 death toll?

On March 25, 2020, The New York Times said,

“Over the past 24 hours, New York City’s public hospital system said in a statement, 13 people at Elmhurst [Hospital] had died.”

The article provided no context for how many deaths the hospital usually experiences in a day but the implication from the headline & other details in the story was clear: 13 deaths in 24 hours is not typical and Elmhurst is experiencing ‘apocalyptic’ death.

The number came from a direct statement issued by NYC Health + Hospitals Corporation, the agency that operates Elmhurst and 10 other publicly-funded hospitals and was also reported by CNN and many other news outlets around the world.

More than four years later, it’s worth asking: Did Elmhurst Hospital experience 13 deaths in a day?

The short answer is YES, per data I obtained via public records request.

The long answer involves more questions, more data, and details that are hard to reconcile with what reportedly happened. In this post, I focus on what the numbers claim; in the next Elmhurst post, I address why I don’t necessarily find the numbers trustworthy.

What’s Normal for Elmhurst?

13 deaths in a day sounds scary, but how far from Elmhurst’s “normal” was it?

Because HHC refused to release the 2017-2019 data, I unfortunately don’t have a robust baseline for what the hospital usually experienced in the springtime.¹ Using the months prior to the emergency declarations, it appears Elmhurst averaged 2 deaths a day (range: 0-5) between 1 January 2020 and 16 March 2020. (Figure 1 below).

Figure 1

So 13 deaths in a day would be much higher than the early 2020 “norm,” yet without historical data we don’t know if that number was the most deaths in a day the hospital had ever seen - or how it compares to a “bad flu season” like 2017-2018.

Were Media Right?

Media were citing a number provided by HHC in a statement issued to the press, so the real question is, “Are the data HHC provided via public records request consistent with what the agency told the media at the time?”

In figure 2 below, we see 12 deaths reported for Elmhurst on March 24th and 5 deaths for March 25th. It would be nice to know when the “24-hour” period began, but I feel comfortable saying the “13” reported at the time matches the official data I received.

Figure 2

Extending the timeline through the end of April 2020 (figure 3) we see 13 deaths in a day was rather low for those “COVID” weeks. The Elmhurst data show 24 days in a row of double-digit deaths, including seven days of 20 or more deaths.

The peak - 31 deaths on Monday, April 6, 2020 - was six times the number of deaths experienced on any day in January or February.

Figure 3

The New York Times published other stories about Elmhurst after March 25 but the number of deaths occurring there each day wasn’t mentioned. There’s no “31 Deaths in a Day” headline, despite 31 deaths being more than double the number in the March 25th headline (i.e., 13).

I can’t find an article from any news outlet that gives the total number of deaths at Elmhurst in the spring, or that says the hospital saw nearly 500 deaths in four weeks, when “normal” for that many days is 60-70. This could have been a function of HHC not issuing another statement to the press and/or of the agency declining to answer any journalist who later asked for numbers.

The Rest of 2020

After the March-April event, daily deaths at Elmhurst Hospital returned to baseline and stayed there for the rest of the year (figure 4).²

Figure 4

Not only was “COVID” finished impacting death, the continued mitigations, civil unrest, and other stressors during the summer, fall, and early winter in New York City apparently had no real impact on Elmhurst’s rate - or that of the city’s hospitals as a whole.³

Elmhurst has more than 500 beds. Although discrepant occupancy data make it hard to know how full those beds were or weren’t, the number of monthly deaths reported for March and April is incredible, showing a total loss nearly equivalent to every bed (Figure 5). Most casualties occurred in four weeks.

Figure 5

Tallies from the New York state SPARCS database give a sense of how Elmhurst’s 2020 compares to other years.⁴ The total number of inpatients discharged and total number of inpatients discharged expired (dead) for 2009 - 2021 is shown in Figure 6; corresponding rates are in Table 1.

Figure 6 (Does not include emergency department discharges and deaths)

Table 1

Reasons for the annual declines in inpatient discharges and deaths from 2009 -2016 are beyond the scope of this article, but the fact that any hospital - let alone a public hospital - can more than double its annual rate of inpatient deaths and escape a federal inquiry is mind-blowing.

Looking at the annual number of inpatients discharged expired (versus alive) in the years prior to 2020 (shown in figure 6), it’s easy to wonder if records could have been held back or “stolen” from the past and reclassified for 2020. This is speculative, of course, and would not be limited to Elmhurst in the event of a citywide manipulated curve. Checking that hypothesis is a reason I requested the daily death data for 2017-2019. HHC refusing to release those years doesn’t help me exclude that possibility.

Too Much Death in Too Little Time?

Did Elmhurst Hospital really see that much death in that little time?

The same question should be asked of all New York hospitals; however, Elmhurst is of special interest because it was elevated to national prominence and cited as a reason President Trump extended the “15 Days to Slow the Spread” decree another 30 days.

On March 31, 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported, "Ultimately, Mr. Trump was convinced [to extend ‘social distancing guidelines’] by the numbers and reports about refrigerator trucks being used to hold the bodies of people who have died of the virus at Elmhurst Hospital in New York City, according to aides."⁵

Americans don’t have to think the President was or wasn’t “tricked” into believing a spread event involving a deadly disease was occurring to remember (or observe with the benefit of hindsight) the role and purpose of the Elmhurst spectacle in those days.

As to whether the numbers can be trusted, I’ll explain in my next Elmhurst post why I do not accept the hospital’s death data as necessarily true, and what questions remain about the events inside New York City’s “epicenter of the epicenter” in spring 2020.

1. The data I’m reporting for Elmhurst were obtained as part of a request I submitted to NYC Health + Hospitals Corporation (HHC) last year. I wrote about battle over that request here and shared the 2020 death data I received for all eleven public hospitals here.

2. The same is true for the citywide hospital death curve, which is a sign of coordinated data (in my opinion) versus a sign of a virus “hitting” the city in a manner resulting in a consistent distribution across hospitals.

3. See figure 6.

4. Time-series not available without a research proposal.

5. I consider “extended social distancing guidelines” to be a euphemism for “proclaimed the extension of an illegal federal mass quarantine & business/school closure directive”.