COVID-19 has devastated the earth in the past six months and has caused a ton of deaths. But, not all people with COVID have died because of COVID, but a combination of previous underlying diseases or body issues. Because of this, we are not certain among the actual death toll caused by COVID-19. There is also the possibility that the deaths but I will get to that in a short moment. Furthermore, countries like India and Brazil, two of the top three countries in COVID deaths and cases do not have as much testing. So, can the deaths be as much as 33% more? OR can it be 16% less? Let’s find out.
First off, COVID has a death toll of an estimated 542,000. Also, the CDC made a report in 2017 that 100 million adult Americans have diabetes or prediabetes. That means around 1/4 Americans have diabetes. so, if we multiply 133,000 (amount of COVID deaths in the US) with 125%, we get 166,250. This means that there could well be an additional 33,000 deaths. But in other countries, not as much people have diabetes because Americans eat a lot of junk food.
Also, the deaths might be overcounted because they might think that a person died of COVID, but they actually died from a stroke from cholesterol build-up. This might happen because COVID helps some underlying conditions to worsen. Therefore, there is a high chance that a person died of a different cause.
Lastly, Covid deaths can be under counted because of countries not having big technological advances like India and Brazil. India has over 1.4 billion people and it ranks third on coronavirus deaths. Also, a lot of people there are livng in farms and far away from big cities and hospitals so to them it is unclear what the cause of death is. Also, the poverty there does not allow big testing sites all over India so if a village catches it, they might not even know.
To sum it up, Coronavirus deaths to me seem undercounted given the two facts I gave. There is also a small chance that Coronavirus deaths have been overcounted.