Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press has an article this morning on the underreporting of coronavirus deaths from around the world.  The basic message is that because of poor testing we really don’t know how many victims the pandemic has claimed.  Here is an excerpt from the article.

“China acknowledged that the coronavirus death toll in the one-time epicenter city of Wuhan was nearly 50% higher than reported, underscoring just how seriously the official numbers of infections and deaths around the world may be understating the dimensions of the disaster.

In Italy, Spain, Britain, the United States and elsewhere, similar doubts emerged as governments revised their death tolls or openly questioned the accuracy of them.

“We are probably only seeing the tip of the iceberg,” said Barcelona University epidemiologist Antoni Trilla, who heads the Spanish government’s expert panel on the crisis.

Worldwide, the outbreak has infected more than 2.1 million people and killed over 145,000, according to a Johns Hopkins University tally based on figures supplied by government health authorities around the globe. The death toll in the U.S. topped 33,000, with more than 670,000 confirmed infections.

Authorities say infections and deaths have been under-reported almost everywhere. Thousands have died with COVID-19 symptoms — many in nursing homes, which have been ravaged by a disease that hits the elderly the hardest — without being tested. Four months into the outbreak, nations are still struggling to increase their testing capacity, and many are still far from their goal.

In Italy, officials have acknowledged that the country’s official death toll of more than 22,000 understates the true number, primarily because it doesn’t include those who died in nursing homes and were not tested.

A government survey released Friday of about one-third of Italy’s nursing homes found more than 6,000 residents have died since Feb. 1. It was unclear how many were a result of COVID-19.

In Britain, the official death toll of about 14,600 has come under increasing scrutiny because it likewise does not include any deaths at home or in nursing homes. The country’s statistics agency has said the actual number of dead could be around 15% higher; others think it will be far more.

And in Spain, the country’s 17 autonomous regions were ordered to adopt uniform criteria on counting the dead. The country has recorded more than 19,000 deaths, but the system leaves out patients who had symptoms but were not tested before they died.

“There is a general feeling that the epidemiologists don’t have a clue of what’s going on, that experts know even less and that governments are concealing information, but I don’t think that’s true,” said Hermelinda Vanaclocha, an epidemiologist on Spain’s top virus advisory panel. “It’s simply not easy.”

China raised its overall death toll to over 4,600 after Wuhan, where the outbreak first took hold, added nearly 1,300 deaths. Questions have long swirled around the accuracy of China’s case reporting, with critics saying officials sought to minimize the outbreak that began in December.

That has been a struggle around the world, though. The official death toll in New York City soared by more than half earlier this week when health authorities began including people who probably had COVID-19 but died without being tested. Nearly 3,800 deaths were added to the city’s count.

Such figures can have a huge influence on governments’ actions, as medical staffs struggle to figure out how to cope with surges of sick people and officials make crucial decisions about where to devote resources and how to begin easing lockdowns to resuscitate their economies.”

I am no expert but I am fearful that we have a long way to go to figure this out. President Trump’s recent call for opening up the country has been questioned by governors for the same reasons as mentioned in the article, that is, we do not have a handle on coronavirus testing and without it we need to be cautious in order not to worsen the situation.

Tony

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