AS COVID-19 has spread around the world, people have become grimly familiar with the death tolls that their governments publish each day. These numbers give a better indication of a country’s trajectory than do counts of confirmed cases, which largely measure how many people have been tested. Nonetheless, official covid-19 death tolls still under-count the true number of fatalities that the disease has already caused at that point.

In many places, official daily figures exclude anybody who did not die in hospital or who did not test positive. Often the cause of death takes several days to establish, which creates a lag in the data. And even the most complete covid-19 records will not count people who were killed by other conditions that probably would have been treated successfully, had hospitals not been overwhelmed by a surge of patients needing intensive care.
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That discrepancy will surely be greater in poorer countries, which have less capacity for testing and treating patients. For example, data about burials in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, suggest that the official covid-19 figures in March might have captured only 5% of the true toll.