Many deaths from COVID-19 went undetected in official reports from 2020 and 2021, because of limited testing capacity and misclassification of causes of death. This lack of data makes it challenging to quantify the mortality toll of short-term events, such as wars and natural disasters, as well as pandemics. For this reason, excess mortality — defined as the difference between all observed and expected deaths in a given period — is considered the gold-standard approach for estimating the mortality toll of short-term events2,3. But it is hard to find a universally effective way to measure excess mortality4,5, because there are substantial variations in underlying mortality trends and data availability across populations.
…The authors report that there were between 13.2 million and 16.6 million more deaths than expected in 2020 and 2021. This death toll was between 2.4 and 3.1 times higher than the officially reported number of COVID-19-related deaths…
Ned Hamson's Second Line View of the News 