Remarks On Actual Deaths Numbers

Correct demographics are hard to come by, particularly when there is little time for verification, such as now. The exact number of cases (incidence) depends on the number of tests performed and is therefore not a good metric to calculate with, let alone base political decisions on.

Death numbers are more reliable because it is hard to argue if a person is dead or not. But when it comes to the cause of death, numbers can differ too. For instance, it is possible that deaths that occur outside of hospitals are not registered at all as being related to the pandemic.

Researchers at the IHME at the University of Washington in Seattle have now looked into this issue. In a nutshell, for a given country, they calculated the average deaths going back several years and compared this number to all deaths reported during the time of the Corona pandemic, which is always higher. They adjusted this number for some factors detailed on their web site. They found that the number of reported Corona deaths was underreported in all countries, sometimes severely so.

Below is a table listing the 20 countries with the highest death numbers, sorted by actual deaths. The USA is at the top here, followed by India. However, if you sort the list by "actual deaths per 100K", India will be found at the bottom of the list and other countries will be at the top, such as Peru, Mexico, Romania, Russia and Kazakhstan. The researchers at IMHE also provide a table with the top 20 countries for deaths per 100 000 people and India is not even among them.

The media hype about India's real (and homemade) problem makes us not see that there are other countries that might be suffering as well, or even more. The media keep reporting the high daily (absolute) numbers, but, in a country with the world's second largest population, all demographics are big numbers. India's problem is NOT the "high" numbers, it is the high speed with which these numbers grow, paired with a complete unpreparedness of people and health care system.

What would I take away from this table? Russia has a big problem and Egypt is not a good tourist destination and, sorry Japan, but there should be no Olympic games.

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