Our excess-mortality tracker reveals the hidden toll of covid-19
has spread around the world, people have become grimly familiar with the death tolls that their governments publish each day. These numbers give a better indication of a country’s trajectory than do counts of confirmed cases, which largely measure how many people have been tested. Nonetheless, official covid-19 death tolls still under-count the true number of fatalities that the disease has already caused at that point.
However, the national statistical offices in a handful of Western countries have released some total mortality data to the end of March. A few—such as Italy and the Netherlands—showed an excess of deaths that was more than twice the official covid-19 tally for the same period. That discrepancy will surely be greater in poorer countries, which have less capacity for testing and treating patients.
France’s official death toll accelerated rapidly in April, after its central health authority began including people who died in nursing and care homes. By April 15th, nearly 40% of the 17,000 recorded national fatalities came from such institutions. This approach should mean that from now on the country will understate covid-19 deaths less severely than its European peers.
By April 3rd, the latest date for which deaths from all causes are available, there had been around 7,000 excess deaths in England and Wales during the previous four weeks, covering the entire period of the outbreak. The revised covid death toll was 6,200—up from the 4,300 recorded in the health ministry’s daily data. This suggests that the true death toll was still about 10% higher than the revised covid tally.
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