Coronavirus: deaths could be more than double some official figures

Given the unreliability of official Covid-19 infection numbers, some suggest looking only at the number of deaths, a number some researchers argue is more reliable.

However, there is much to suggest the number of deaths, like the number of infections, could be significantly understated.

Emerging data from Italy, Spain and France suggest that confirmed Covid-19 deaths explain less than half of the total difference in deaths between March 2019 and March 2020.

According to The Economist, journalists from the newspaper L’Eco di Bergamo and researchers who looked at death figures in Bergamo, a province of northern Italy, found an unexplained gap in the death rate during March 2020.

In March 2019, the death rate in the province of Bergamo was 19 per 100,000. In March 2020, the death rate was 113 per 100,000, almost 6 times the rate. The confirmed Covid-19 death rate of 43 per 100,000 for the region explains much of the 94 (113 – 19) per 100,000 difference, however, it still leaves an unexplained difference of 51 per 100,000.

How can this gap be explained?

Giorgio Gori, the mayor of the region’s capital thinks the confirmed Covid-19 death figure is the tip of the iceberg. According to him, many victims are not included in the reports because they died at home.

People dying before they could be tested or before they could make it to a hospital could easily be excluded from official Covid-19 fatalities.

Similar research suggests similar patterns in Spain and France. Higher than normal death rates exceeding those explained by official Covid-19 deaths have been observed in the Spanish regions of Castile-La Mancha and Madrid and the French region of Haut-Rhin. In these regions the spikes in death were more than double the official Covid-19 death figures.

It appears that the number of Covid-19 deaths is another thing we don’t know.

More on this:
Economist article (in English)

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