What is the pandemic's true death toll? After months of work, we are launching our daily updating estimate of excess deaths around the world. With official deaths at 4.5m, I estimate the true tally to be between 9.3m and 18.1m, as of today 
That includes deaths to covid-19, but also those lost to overburdened hospitals - and lives saved due to fewer ill with influenza. Rather than trying to distinguish between types of deaths, our approach is to count all of them
A true tally of 2 to 4 times the official one might seem striking enough. But knowing where the uncounted victims of the pandemic are is important too
These two maps tell two very different stories of the pandemic - only one of them is not dependent on testing which many poor countries cannot afford:
A common tale of the pandemic has also been one of "waves": but our data suggest that globally, there has been a gradual rise, with one exception: India's delta wave, which we estimate killed millions (global wave below)
The current overall official toll in India is less than 450 thousand: we estimate the true tally to be between 1.1m and 7m
Huge thanks @Rukmini, Sumitra Debroy, @thej, Srinivasan Ramani, and Vignesh Radhakrishnan who have collected total mortality counts from India, which helped our models be more accurate
Beyond it, the model uses total mortality data from 82 countries, as well as subnational data from Jakarta. Much of it collected by @ArielKarlinsky in his datasets
It matches this to over 100 other indicators, and then uses a machine learning algorithm to project excess deaths where they are unknown. That was, for instance, the case for India as a whole economist.com/graphic-detail…
Using such other data, we can also view the pandemic death counts in new ways. Here are two: estimated excess deaths per population over 65 years old, and implied infection fatality rates
You can also look up individual countries and regions, and compare them: Here is the US vs EU, per 100k population
As the pandemic continues, decisions continue to be made on how to fight it, and who to help. For that, one needs the best picture of the true death toll, as close to the present as possible - if you know of a way to improve on our attempt at that, let me know
Estimating excess deaths for every country in the world, for every day, for multiple years, is a complex process. We are 100% transparent: you can view all our data, estimates, changelog, and code here github.com/TheEconomist/c…
Huge thanks to all our sources, which we list both in our methodology and live page. That page, designed by the excellent @martingz and including all this data, will update every single day going forward. You can find it here: economist.com/graphic-detail…
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