How many people has the coronavirus killed? this high-level metric has several flaws. It cannot distinguish between those who are dying of the disease and those who succumb to other factors related to the pandemic, such as disruptions to regular health care, which can delay treatments or mean that people do not seek medical care. It relies on accurate, timely reporting of deaths, which can be limited owing to underdeveloped death-registration systems, or might even be intentionally suppressed. And as with so many other aspects of the pandemic, the statistic has become politicized — a way for countries to claim superiority over one another.
Experts worry that simple reports of excess deaths have led to premature or faulty comparisons of countries’ pandemic responses, and have largely ignored the situation in low- and middle-income countries owing to a lack of data.
