Undercounting deaths a deadly mistake
By Jeet Heer
TODAY 11:02 AM
... social scientists .. like to look at the number of excess deaths above what would be statistically normal ...
... “Last week, two researchers from northern Italy made this point forcefully when looking at Nembro, a small town near Bergamo that has been very severely hit by the outbreak. Writing in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera they found there had been 158 deaths in the town in 2020 so far, as opposed to 35 on average in the previous five years. They noted that Nembro had only counted 31 deaths from Covid-19, which looks like an underestimate.”
If these figures are correct, then the number of undetected Covid-19 cases in Nembro is roughly three or four times higher than the detected cases. Of course, in the future epidemiologists will refine these numbers, since they will have a better sense of how many deaths there were because the medical system was overwhelmed, meaning that people with curable ailments were not treated. But these deaths also should be considered as part of the toll of Covid-19, even if the disease itself wasn’t the main culprit ...
... in the United States, as in Italy, there are Covid-19 deaths that aren’t tabulated in the official numbers ... “Another 200 city residents are now dying at home each day, compared to 20 to 25 such deaths before the pandemic, said Aja Worthy-Davis, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office. And an untold number of them are unconfirmed” ...
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/undercounting-coronavirus-death-count/
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