{"id":168439,"date":"2020-09-14T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2020-09-14T11:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=168439"},"modified":"2020-12-02T09:57:41","modified_gmt":"2020-12-02T09:57:41","slug":"how-many-people-has-the-coronavirus-killed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/09\/how-many-people-has-the-coronavirus-killed\/","title":{"rendered":"How Many People Has the Coronavirus Killed?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researchers are struggling to tally mortality statistics as the pandemic rages.<\/em>
\nHere\u2019s how they gauge the true toll of the coronavirus outbreak.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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A worker digs a grave in a cemetery near Mexico City as the coronavirus outbreak continues. Credit: Edgard Garrido\/Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

1 Sep 2020 – <\/em>At the beginning of March, Andrew Noymer felt a familiar twinge of doubt. He was watching countries across Europe and North America begin to record their first deaths from COVID-19, and he knew there could be problems with the data. Even in a normal winter, some deaths caused by influenza get misclassified as pneumonia. If that can happen with a well-known disease, there were bound to be deaths from COVID-19 going unreported, thought Noymer, a demographer at the University of California, Irvine. \u201cI just remember thinking, \u2018this is going to be really difficult to explain to people\u2019,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n

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And in March and April, when national statistics offices began to release tallies of the number of deaths, it confirmed his suspicions: the pandemic was killing a lot more people than the COVID-19 figures alone would suggest.<\/p>\n

In times of upheaval \u2014 wars, natural disasters, outbreaks of disease \u2014 researchers need to tally deaths rapidly, and usually turn to a blunt but reliable metric: excess mortality. It\u2019s a comparison of expected deaths with ones that actually happened, and, to many scientists, it\u2019s the most robust way to gauge the impact of the pandemic. It can help epidemiologists to draw comparisons between countries, and, because it can be calculated quickly, it can identify COVID-19 hotspots that would otherwise have gone undetected. According to data from more than 30 countries for which estimates of excess deaths are available (see \u2018Terrible toll\u2019), there were nearly 600,000 more deaths than would normally be predicted in these nations for the period between the onset of the pandemic and the end of July (413,041 of those were officially attributed to COVID-19).<\/p>\n

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Sources: The Economist<\/i>\/The Financial Times<\/i>\/Our World in Data\/Eurostat\/Human Mortality Database<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But this high-level metric has several flaws. It cannot distinguish between those who are dying of the disease and those who succumb to other factors related to the pandemic, such as disruptions to regular health care, which can delay treatments or mean that people do not seek medical care. It relies on accurate, timely reporting of deaths, which can be limited owing to underdeveloped death-registration systems, or might even be intentionally suppressed. And as with so many other aspects of the pandemic, the statistic has become politicized \u2014 a way for countries to claim superiority over one another.<\/p>\n

Experts worry that simple reports of excess deaths have led to premature or faulty comparisons of countries\u2019 pandemic responses, and have largely ignored the situation in low- and middle-income countries owing to a lack of data.<\/p>\n