It’s counting differently. It also has been hit hard.
Van Laethem showed reporters a slide of calculations from the Economist magazine indicating that Belgium’s official coronavirus toll closely tracks “excess deaths” for the pandemic period — the number of deaths that exceed what would be expected for the period, based on the country’s historical death rates. Belgium attributed 7,559 deaths between March 16 and April 26 to the coronavirus.
But because countries are counting their coronavirus deaths differently, epidemiologists have begun to favor excess death calculations as the most accurate way to track the impact of the virus. By the Economist’s analysis, Britain was the worst-hit of the countries it examined, as measured by excess deaths compared to overall population. Spain was second; with Belgium a close third. The newsweekly did not calculate excess death figures for the United States, but estimated that New York City’s excess death rate was far ahead that of Britain. Dense cities have often been hit especially hard.Belgian officials acknowledge that the country has been hit hard.
“We count very accurately, but that does not alleviate that we were also severely hit,” said Steven Van Gucht, the head of viral diseases at Belgium’s equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One explanation, he said, might be Belgium’s relative population density in comparison to its neighbors: the Brussels airport, an international transportation hub, might have helped seed the disease in the crowded capital region. And many Belgians were on skiing vacations in northern Italy during national school vacations in late February.
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