COVID pandemic death toll may be 3 times higher than official tally, new study finds

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."The estimate predates the Omicron variant's peak in many countries, which drove large waves of deaths in the U.S. and elsewhere over the past few months.

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Many of the additional deaths over the past two years can be directly linked to cases of COVID-19. However, the study's authors say a variety of other factors — ranging from underreporting of infections to the disease's strain on hospitals — may account for the unprecedented number of additional deaths during the pandemic.

"Further research will help to reveal how many deaths were caused directly by COVID-19, and how many occurred as an indirect result of the pandemic," the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's Dr. Haidong Wang, the paper's lead author, said in a release.

While the U.S. overall does not rank among the nations with the world's worst rates of excess mortality, it does have one of the largest total numbers of excess deaths in the study. The pandemic's biggest cumulative toll came from India, the U.S., Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia and Pakistan.

"These seven countries accounted for more than half of the global excess deaths due to COVID-19 over the 24-month period," the study's authors wrote.

Researchers noted that some southern U.S. states ranked among the world's worst excess mortality rates from COVID-19.

For every 100,000 residents, an estimated 329.7 additional deaths occurred in Mississippi during the pandemic, the highest of any state. In the study's global estimates, only 21 nations exceeded 300 excess deaths per 100,000 citizens.

More than 12,000 residents of Mississippi have died from COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's official tally, the most per capita of any state.

"I think this paper highlights the importance of using excess deaths in the analysis of the effects of any sort of pandemic or epidemic like this, in order to get a sense of the true, complete impact," says Robert Anderson, chief of the CDC's mortality statistics branch.

The study published Thursday echoes similar figures that have been generated by Anderson's team, which has been calculating excess deaths on a weekly basis throughout the pandemic in the U.S.

"You see for some of these countries, there are very few numbers of COVID deaths but quite large numbers of excess deaths. That doesn't suffer from errors in cause of death certification. A death is a death, and it's pretty easy to tell if people are dead even if it's not that easy to tell what they died from," Anderson said.

Based on data through January 2022, the CDC's own estimate of excess deaths during the pandemic passed 1 million earlier this year. Other ongoing research by the agency suggests the number of Americans who have been infected by the coronavirus could be double that of official reports.

The CDC's current excess deaths figure may include some fatalities from other disasters that occurred during the past two years, Anderson noted, like the winter storm in Texas that led to crippling blackouts. However, the vast majority of additional deaths have come from COVID-19 cases, which ranks among the country's leading causes of death."...

IIRC they are still studying and reassessing the deaths and co-morbidities from the 1918 influenza pandemic, because we don't have all the data in real time. AND, still pulling out data and threads of information from an 1880s pandemic in Russia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic#:~:text=The%201889%E2%80%931890%20pandemic%2C%20often,the%20deadliest%20pandemics%20in%20history.