George Leef asks the good question of which country got through Covid with the least damage, and offers Sweden as the likely answer.
The gang over at The Economist are trying to put numbers on total casualty count of Covid-19 worldwide, noting that there are a bunch of complications. Do you count those who died while having another ailment as well as Covid-19, i.e., dying with Covid-19 but not from Covid-19? Do you count those who died of non-Covid-19 causes but who put off medical checkups or treatment because of a quarantine or lockdown? And how do we account for less competent governments that likely aren’t collecting accurate data from every far-flung province? And what do we do for autocratic, habitually dishonest countries that are attempting to cover up dire death tolls?
The Economist’s analysts resolved the questions by choosing to looking at all deaths reported since the start of the pandemic, and comparing that figure to what the normal pre-pandemic death rate suggested it would be. The first observation is that the global death toll could be two to four times higher than the official numbers listed at sites like Worldometers.
Rather than trying to distinguish between types of deaths, The Economist’s approach is to count all of them. The standard method of tracking changes in total mortality is “excess deaths”. This number is the gap between how many people died in a given region during a given time period, regardless of cause, and how many deaths would have been expected if a particular circumstance (such as a natural disaster or disease outbreak) had not occurred. Although the official number of deaths caused by Covid-19 is now 6.2 million, our single best estimate is that the actual toll is 21.3 million people. We find that there is a 95 percent chance that the true value lies between 14.6 million and 24.8 million additional deaths.
Perhaps most useful, the Economist statisticians contrasted the number of official reported deaths in a country or continent against the estimated excess deaths in that region.
By this measure, the global champion in denial is Burundi, which claims 38 deaths from Covid-19, but that The Economist calculates has had 3,600 to 21,000 more deaths than it would normally have since the start of the pandemic. The Economist estimates that the official death toll is roughly 51,000 percent higher than the official number. Landlocked, resource-poor, one of if not the poorest country in the world, and beset by political repression, strife and corruption, we should not exactly be shocked that Burundi is either denying the full death toll or incapable of accurately measuring it.
The other countries with the largest percentage disparities between their official death toll are similarly troubled, poor, third-world countries: Chad, South Sudan, Niger, Burkina Faso, Tajikistan… and then there’s a country that stands out from the rest: The People’s Republic of China.
Officially, the People’s Republic of China has suffered 4,876 deaths from Covid-19 in a country with roughly 1.4 billion people. The Economist calculates that since the start of the pandemic, anywhere from 550,000 to 2 million more Chinese people have died than would be expected under the normal pre-pandemic death rate. This means the likely death toll is roughly 12,000 percent higher than the official figure. (All figures are current as of April 29.)
After China, the list goes back to similarly troubled, poorer, third-world countries: Congo, Tanzania, Nigeria, Nicaragua, Sudan . . .
Intriguingly, The Economist calculated Sweden had 12,000 to 15,000 excess deaths since the start of the pandemic, and Sweden’s official count is 18,689. So Sweden’s official number is actually higher than the estimate based on excess deaths!
But Sweden doesn’t have the best ratio between the excess death estimate and the official count. A few countries had fewer deaths reported than would be expected during that time period. Perhaps the mask-wearing prevented the spread of flu, or fewer cars on the roads meant fewer accidents.
The Economist calculated Taiwan had 5,500 to 1,900 fewer deaths than would be expected during the time period of the pandemic, while reporting 858 deaths from Covid-19. Their official death count is 700 percent higher than the estimate!
As for us here in the United States, The Economist team estimates that our total number of excess deaths during the pandemic was 1.2 million to 1.3 million, and the official Covid-19 death toll is 992,740, suggesting our death toll from the virus is roughly 20 percent higher than the official figures.
Oh, and one other thing makes China stand out from Burundi, Chad, South Sudan, and the rest. We didn’t see any U.S. news media writing stories about how “power and patriotism” was helping Burundi or Chad “beat the virus” and “coming roaring back” in February 2021.