Some politicians and a few public health practitioners have argued that COVID-19 deaths are overcounted. For instance, a January 2023 opinion
piece in The Washington Post claims that COVID-19 death tallies include
not only those who died from COVID-19 but those who died from other
causes but happened to have COVID-19.

Most scientists, however, have suggested that COVID-19 death tallies
represent underestimates because they fail to capture COVID-19 deaths
that were misclassified to other causes of death.

We are part of a team of researchers at Boston University, University of Minnesota, University of California San Francisco and other institutions
who have been tracking COVID-19 deaths since the beginning of the
pandemic. A major goal for our team has been to assess whether the undercounting of COVID-19 deaths has occurred, and if so in which parts
of the country.

Examining excess deaths
One way to examine the issue is to look at what population health
researchers call excess mortality. It’s a measure which, in this case, compares the number of deaths that occurred during the pandemic to the
number of deaths that would have been expected based on pre-pandemic trends.

Excess mortality captures deaths that arose from COVID-19 directly or
through indirect pathways such as patients avoiding hospitals during
COVID-19 surges. While determining a cause of death can be a complex
process, recording whether or not someone died is more straightforward.
For this reason, calculations of excess deaths are viewed as the least
biased estimate of the pandemic’s death toll.

As a general rule of thumb – with some important caveats that we explain below – if there are more COVID-19 deaths than excess deaths, COVID-19
deaths were likely overestimated. If there are more excess deaths than
COVID-19 deaths, COVID-19 deaths were likely underestimated.

In a newly released study that has not yet been peer-reviewed, our team
found that during the first two years of the pandemic – from March 2020
to February 2022 – there were between 996,869 and 1,278,540 excess
deaths in the U.S. Among these, 866,187 were recognized as COVID-19 on
death certificates. This means that there were between 130,682 and
412,353 more excess deaths than COVID-19 deaths. The gap between excess
deaths and COVID-19 deaths was large in both the first and second years
of the pandemic. This suggests that COVID-19 deaths were undercounted
even after the pandemic’s chaotic early months.
[snip]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/covid-19-deaths-in-the-us-continue-to-be-undercounted-research-shows-despite-claims-of-overcounts/ar-AA16JoDm?cvid=d83badb1edb547cbb249a23804ba22d6

TB

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