A: The official numbers are most likely an undercount of actual COVID-19 related deaths.
Read this Twitter feed for a breakdown of the types of COVID-19 deaths written by fellow demographer Andrew Noymer.
The numbers on the dashboards only include those deaths that fall into Category 1, confirmed COVID-19 cases. Category 2 includes deaths that are misattributed to other causes (either due to lack of testing or false negative test results). Category 3 includes deaths from other causes that have worse outcomes due to hospital overload. In Category 4, COVID-19 deaths are displacing deaths that may have come from another cause in the coming months. Plus, we must remember the downstream effects of what the economic and social upheaval will do to overall mortality risk.
