Everyone suspected Mexico City's coronavirus death count was too low. Two citizen sleuths ...

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Everyone suspected Mexico City's coronavirus death count was too low. Two citizen sleuths unearthed the startling truth.

Link to tweet

[DBoon]

1. from the tweeted WAPO article

MEXICO CITY — The mystery surfaced early in the pandemic. Hospitals were jammed with coronavirus victims, but the official death count in Mexico City appeared suspiciously low. Sitting at her dining-room table one afternoon, Laurianne Despeghel, a 31-year-old economic consultant, clicked from chart to chart on her laptop, puzzling over how to uncover the real toll.

“I think the data exist,” she typed to Mario Romero Zavala, a fellow math geek. She’d heard that death certificates were stored in a database at the city’s civil registry. But it would be tough to crack. A day later, Romero Zavala messaged back with an idea. “I’m going to hurry,” the 37-year-old software developer wrote. “I think by tomorrow morning we’ll have the data.”

...

Thus began a cat-and-mouse game with the government that would last nearly a year and catapult the pair to national prominence. Just days after their conversation, they’d conclude that around 8,000 more people had died in Mexico’s capital in the first five months of 2020 compared to prior years. By February 2021, they’d count 83,235 excess deaths — more than twice the government’s confirmed covid-19 fatality total.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/03/mexico-coronavirus-excess-death/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_source=twitter