Covid Death Toll in US Likely 16% Higher Than Official Tally, Study Says

The Guardian reports:The Covid death toll in the U.S. is likely at least 16% higher than the official tally, according to a new study, and researchers believe the cause of the undercounting goes beyond overloaded health systems to a lack of awareness of Covid and low levels of testing. The second year of the pandemic also had nearly as many uncounted excess deaths as the first, the study found. More than 1.1 million Americans have died from Covid, according to official records. But the actual number is assuredly higher, given the high rates of excess deaths. Demographers wanted to know how many could be attributed to Covid, and they drilled down to data at the county level to discover patterns in geography and time. There were 1.2 million excess deaths from natural causes - excluding deaths from accidents, firearms, suicide and overdoses - between March 2020 and August 2022, the researchers estimated, and about 163,000 of those deaths were not attributed to Covid in any way - but most of them should have been, the researchers say... "The mortality that's not considered Covid starts a little bit before the Covid surges officially start and crests a little bit sooner," said Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, associate professor in the department of sociology and the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota and one of the study's authors. That indicates some people didn't realize their illness was Covid, due to a lack of awareness about its prevalence and low levels of testing. There was also a rise in out-of-hospital deaths - in homes and nursing homes, for instance - which makes ascertaining the cause of death more difficult... "[W]e find over the first 30 months of the pandemic that serious gaps remained in surveillance," said Andrew Stokes, associate professor of global health and sociology at Boston University and one of the study's authors. "Even though we got a lot better at testing for Covid, we were still missing a lot of official Covid deaths" in the U.S., said Jennifer Dowd, professor of demography and population health at University of Oxford, who was not involved in this research. The phenomenon "underscores how badly the U.S. fared as the pandemic continued," Wrigley-Field said. "It does profoundly reflect failures in the public health system." One of the study's authors told the Guardian that the hardest-hit areas were non-metropolitan counties, especially in the west and the south, with fewer resources for investigating deaths (and lower testing levels) - as well as different methodologies for assembling the official numbers.

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