It's of course worth noting that China is one of the countries that stopped reporting excess deaths themselves since it would be pretty obvious that if China e.g. reported a million excess deaths then the majority could likely be attributed to SARS2 (whether they die directly from the virus or starve as a result of their brutal lockdowns).
China has 18.7% of the world's population and 0.00018% of the current coronavirus cases [0], if you believe their reported numbers. So yes, I'm willing to believe there are vastly more deaths than reported as well.
"China is another story. Its official statistics understate the Chinese Covid death rate by 17,000% (according to The Economist’s model).
In fact, based on excess mortality calculations, The Economist estimates that the true number of Covid deaths in China is not 4,636 – but something like 1.7 million."
"Beijing Is Intentionally Underreporting China’s Covid Death Rate"
I wouldn't trust such numbers from China. Their death rate has looked like this [1] [2] since April 2020. Coincidentally, that is when covid cases began to take off in the west. China stopped adding to their death toll after they revised their numbers upwards exactly 50% (1290/2579) [3].
Economist using excess deaths figures from countries that failed contain covid to make upper bound inferences for PRC, which contained covid.
Also range starts from MINUS 150K, i.e. excess life. Which makes more sense considering the source Economist used to extrapolate excess deaths for PRC concluded excess deaths was lower outside of Hubei/Wuhan in the months post lockdown [0] and things have been basically normal since due to aggressive covid zero policies. Other countries that aggressively contained covid also has excess life stats.
The numbers are worse. Even a current tally of excess deaths shows that, even in places with fairly orderly disease and deaths reporting, COVID deaths are underreported. The economist tracks excess deaths here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
Nearly all countries are like this AFAICT the US coronavirus deaths figure is around 140k, but the full excess death figure is somewhere around 170k (it's difficult to find good figures, some are here - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm )
"Summing up the excess mortality estimates across all countries in our dataset gives 3.3 million excess deaths. In contrast, summing up the official COVID-19 death counts gives only 2.1 million deaths."
Interestingly enough, their conclusion was that covid deaths are being undercounted:
"At the time of writing, the world’s official COVID-19 death count is 2.9 million. Our results suggest that the true toll may be above 4.5 million."
While 25million in 8 weeks might be exaggerated, the number reported by chinese is not credible neither.
The US flu death in 2018-2019 is estimated to be 34k. [1]
China's flu death in the same year is 144. [2]
China's population is 4x to that of US. While the numbers cannot be compared directly, the difference in magnitude says at least something about its counting methodology, if not straight out lying
If I am to extrapolate, the corona virus death in china is at least two magnitude under reported
My own country alone has seen nearly 300 000 excess deaths compared to the annual average, with the waves of excess deaths neatly tracking those of known COVID infection waves.
If I remember correctly, that number is true of the US. Globally speaking, The Economist has it pegged at 3.9x. A far cry from 10x, but also a far cry from an undercount of 30%.
Also add to that discrepancies between excess deaths and covid death numbers in places like India, which appears to have a difference of about 7-10x the official covid death count
Excess deaths can and have been tracked based on overall mortality and deviation from previous years. The estimate is greater than official COVID-19 statistics for the US, being 248,000 as of 11 September. Worldwide, excess mortality exceeds COVID-19 statistcs (presently nearing 1 million) by 263,000.
It is more than 4X the official count. Some of that is probably in places with no official numbers. But one wonders how many are in China.
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