Thread by @GidMK

Q: How many people have died globally from COVID-19?

A: Probably more than the confirmed count, but it's really hard to say

coronavirus.medium.com/how-many-peopl…

The basic idea here is that we could be either undercounting or overcounting COVID-19 deaths

I think the most likely explanation is some combination of the two

Based on some very careful examinations of death reporting systems, we can say that there are probably some portion of deaths that are recorded as due to COVID-19 but were not caused by the virus

However this is likely to be pretty modest in scale - mostly impacts high-income countries, and inflates the death toll by maximum 10-15%

Conversely, there is strong evidence that in low-income places, the death toll from COVID-19 is undercounted, sometimes by a factor of 10x or more

Even in high-income places, there is evidence from excess mortality calculations that some proportion of deaths caused by COVID-19 are being missed

All in all, we may be overcounting COVID-19 deaths by a modest amount, but we are almost certainly undercounting them by a much larger fraction. The true death toll may be 50%+ higher