As US govs. rush to reopen businesses, "Excess death" counts begin to reveal true toll of pandemic

As governors in Georgia, Florida, and other states rushed to reopen businesses throughout the country in line with US President Donald Trump’s back-to-work campaign, new figures are beginning to show the real human toll of the COVID-19 pandemic.

New reports in the Economist, Financial Times and New York Times reveal that, when all deaths during the pandemic are tallied, the actual death toll caused by the coronavirus are likely at least twice as high as has been officially reported.

The three media outlets came to this conclusion by studying the number of “excess deaths” in various regions during the pandemic. That is, rather than recording those who died in a hospital and tested positive for COVID-19, they tracked the gap between the total number of people who died from any cause in cities, regions and countries across the world and compared that data to the historical averages for the same place and time of year. This paints a more accurate picture of the bloody swathe of the disease.

In Lombardy, Italy, an epicenter of the pandemic in Europe, it is estimated that the known death toll only accounts for 48 percent of the total number of dead that died. Data from Spain’s national epidemiology center reveal that its counted dead due to the coronavirus are only 65 percent of the estimated excess deaths. In Belgium, which has the second highest number of deaths per capita in the world, only half of the casualties from the pandemic were accurately counted.

Read more: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/23/covi-a23.html