Countries have reported some five million COVID-19 deaths in two years,
but global excess deaths are estimated at double or even quadruple that
figure.

Last year’s Day of the Dead marked a grim milestone. On 1 November, the
global death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic passed 5 million, official
data suggested. It has now reached 5.5 million. But that figure is a
significant underestimate. Records of excess mortality — a metric that
involves comparing all deaths recorded with those expected to occur — show
many more people than this have died in the pandemic.

Working out how many more is a complex research challenge. It is not as
simple as just counting up each country’s excess mortality figures. Some
official data in this regard are flawed, scientists have found. And more
than 100 countries do not collect reliable statistics on expected or
actual deaths at all, or do not release them in a timely manner.

Demographers, data scientists and public-health experts are striving to
narrow the uncertainties for a global estimate of pandemic deaths. These
efforts, from both academics and journalists, use methods ranging from
satellite images of cemeteries to door-to-door surveys and
machine-learning computer models that try to extrapolate global estimates
from available data.

Among these models, the World Health Organization (WHO) is still working
on its first global estimate, but the Institute for Health Metrics and
Evaluation in Seattle, Washington, offers daily updates of its own
modelled results, as well as projections of how quickly the global toll
might rise. And one of the highest-profile attempts to model a global
estimate has come from the news media. The Economist magazine in London
has used a machine-learning approach to produce an estimate of 12 million
to 22 million excess deaths — or between 2 and 4 times the pandemic’s
official toll so far.

The uncertainty in this estimate is a discrepancy the size the population
of Sweden. “The only fair thing to present at this point is a very wide
range,” says Sondre Ulvund Solstad, a data scientist who leads The
Economist’s modelling work. “But as more data come in, we are able to
narrow it.”

The scramble to calculate a global death toll while the pandemic continues
is an exercise that combines sophisticated statistical modelling with
rapid-fire data gathering. Everyone involved knows any answer they provide
will be provisional and imprecise. But they feel it is important to try.
They want to acknowledge the true size and cost of the human tragedy of
COVID-19 (see ‘Comparing pandemics’), and they hope to counter misleading
claims prompted by official figures, such as China’s count of just under
5,000 COVID-19 deaths.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00104-8

(snip full/much longer article, which is well worth reading btw...)

### - this is a really great article in Nature magazine, one ultimately
revealing the many difficulties involved in keeping things, erm, accurate?
heh ;)

information based (here) on models of covid that are admittedly
'inaccurate' and/or which can be manipulated/massaged & fucked with to
prove just about anything they damn well like!?

in most cases usually to the point of either deliberately playing
something down or hyping it up depending on what's convenient...

(cue fictional news flash) - ahh we're just getting an update on that
dirty great big asteroid that's due to hit us in 3 months time? well,
scientists are now saying that they have reason to believe that it's
actually only 4 miles wide instead of 8, which of course means it'll do
far less damage than was expected - isn't that great? - and as such are
urging everyone to remain calm and to continue working lest we have
another disaster of a different kind altogether... and now here's tom with
the weather... heh)

this 'confusion-factor' then applying to everything from population data
to global warming!

to the point that in wallyworld 'opinion' reigns supreme over 'fact' in
the vast majority of cases!

opinions, which THEMSELVES can be just as easily manipulated, massaged &
fucked with, directly BECAUSE of this LACK of verifiable (or even
deliberately obscured) information!

so then... is it 5 million that've died from covid, or 25 million??

i doubt we'll ever really know for sure...

meanwhile, a whole raft of different 'beliefs & opinions' has everyone all
riled up about it + opting for all kinds of illusionary things...

somewhat like life in wallyworld itself huh - what a coincidence! ;)