Will we ever know the real death toll of the pandemic?

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

On a sweltering April night in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the Indian state of Gujarat, Shayar Rawal rode his motorbike to a COVID-designated government hospital at 11:55 p.m. Over the next 24 hours, he had just one task: to count the number of dead bodies being brought to the mortuary.

Rawal—a reporter at the Gujarati daily newspaper Divya Bhaskar—counted four deaths in the first hour. Grieving relatives collected five more dead bodies in the next hour. When the number reached 100, he says, reality sunk in.

“I knew the government was hiding numbers, but this was way more than what I had expected,” Rawal says.

Officially, the city recorded just 15 COVID-19 deaths that day. But by the end of his vigil, Rawal had counted 112 bodies—and that was just the dead from one city hospital. Over the next few weeks, his colleagues also counted bodies at crematoria and burial grounds and accessed death certificates from districts across the state. Their final analysis revealed that the death toll over nine weeks in the state of Gujarat was 10 times higher than the official figure. In response to the Divya Bhaskar report, the state government gave multiple reasons for the discrepancy, from saying deaths with co-morbidities cannot be counted as COVID-19 deaths to claiming that duplicates of death certificates had been issued. National Geographic’s questions to the state government went unanswered.

“There are fundamental, inherent challenges,” says Samira Asma, assistant director general for data, analytics, and delivery for impact at the World Health Organization. Even in wealthy nations, officials are grappling with incorrect diagnoses, irregularities in the data tracking, and other factors that can obscure the virus’s true impact. “So because of this, we don't have a complete understanding of the entire scope of the pandemic.”

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/will-we-ever-know-the-real-death-toll-of-the-pandemic

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. No, of course not.

For one thing, verifying each and every death from Covid is simply not possible, even in countries with good health care and reporting.

Keep in mind, that a century after the 1918 influenza there's still a lot of disagreement over just how many died.

[SoCalDavidS]

2. Human Life Is Irrelevant To Us

Every single death is just more Thoughts & Prayers.

Every death is simply another body that must be disposed of.

400,000.....500,000.....600,000.....600,001. It's all just numbers. The fact there is a real life behind each # means little to so many.

So many Pro-Life dipshits care only about the unborn. Then take your fucking chances once you're out.

The lack of compassion for fellow human beings has become more than apparent over the last 15 months.

And I feel greatly depressed and pessimistic about life in this country, and indeed the world, as a result.