Under Counts are the Rule, not the Exception

The US statistics currently show about 625 thousand deaths from Covid 19, but the excess death data shows about twice that, with CDC excess death data, showing between 1.23 and 1.52 million deaths.

Of course some of these deaths did not come from Covid, there was a surge in opioid deaths, and there may have been deaths from deferred medical care, but an under count of 50% does seem to be a good rough guess.

In India, it looks like they under counted Covid deaths by something approaching 90%.

This is not a surprise.  It is clear that the Modi government is doing its best to lie itself out of its disastrous management of the pandemic. 

But these sorts of demographics are much harder to fudge than official government death counts:

The number of people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic in India so far is likely to exceed three million — nearly 10 times the official Covid-19 death toll — making it one of the worst human tragedies in the nation’s history, according to a new study.

In a comprehensive examination of the true toll of the pandemic in the sprawling nation of 1.4 billion, the Center for Global Development, a Washington research institute, attempted to quantify excess deaths from all causes during the pandemic based on state data, international estimates, serological studies and household surveys.

“True deaths are likely to be in the several millions, not hundreds of thousands, making this arguably India’s worst human tragedy,” said its authors, one of whom is a former chief economic adviser to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The official government numbers have been called into question repeatedly. Even as funeral pyres lit up the night sky and bodies washed up on the Ganges River, with death all around, the Indian government was widely underreporting the scale of the devastation.

………

The study released on Tuesday estimated that between 3.4 and 4.7 million more people than would normally be expected died between January 2020 and June 2021, and includes an estimate suggesting that deaths from Covid-19 alone may have reached four million.

“Estimating Covid deaths with statistical confidence may prove elusive,” the authors wrote. “But all estimates suggest that the death toll from the pandemic is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than the official count of 400,000; they also suggest that the first wave was more lethal than is believed.”

These numbers are incredibly grim.