Coronavirus undercounting widely rampant

https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/how-muc...ses-and-deaths

India. In the midst of a devastating surge, the world’s second-most-populous country is losing close to four thousand people per day, according to health ministry data. But journalists and medical experts say there is massive underreporting, detailing accounts of supervisors instructing crematory workers not to list COVID-19 as the cause of death and local officials hounding labs to report fewer positive cases. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is accused of downplaying the seriousness of the disease and failing to coordinate a national response that includes rigorous testing. Even though official figures claim 300k, the actual figure is expected to be close to 10 times that number.

Brazil. The country has reported nearly fifteen million COVID-19 cases and over four hundred thousand deaths, accounting for 13 percent of the global death toll despite having just 3 percent of the world’s population. Still, analysts say that these totals are undercounts because of a lack of testing and the challenges of tracking COVID-19 deaths in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and other cities, where millions of poor people live. Now, doctors warn that infant deaths from the virus are being severely underreported.

Russia. Throughout the pandemic, Russia’s coronavirus task force has claimed extremely low fatalities compared to other countries, which many foreign observers dismissed as implausible. But in early 2021, the national statistics agency reported that there were more than 160,000 COVID-19 deaths in 2020—almost three times higher than the task force’s total—putting the country’s toll among the highest in the world. The virus continues to kill hundreds of people each day, and officials are still playing down the threat.

United States. In the country with the world’s highest total infections and fatalities, the most commonly cited databases are maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to which states and other jurisdictions report their tallies, and by Johns Hopkins University. Yet, in a new study by the University of Washington, scientists estimate that more than nine hundred thousand people in the United States have died of COVID-19, over 50 percent higher than the CDC and Johns Hopkins estimates.