The Economist: "Our daily estimate of excess deaths around the world" The pandemic’s true death toll " H ow many people have died because of the covid-19 pandemic? The answer depends both on the data available, and on how you define “because”. Many people who die while infected with SARS-CoV-2 are never tested for it, and do not enter the official totals. Conversely, some people whose deaths have been attributed to covid-19 had other ailments that might have ended their lives on a similar timeframe anyway. And what about people who died of preventable causes during the panHdemic, because hospitals full of covid-19 patients could not treat them? If such cases count, they must be offset by deaths that did not occur but would have in normal times, such as those caused by flu or air pollution . Rather than trying to distinguish between types of deaths, The Economist ’s approach is to count all of them. The standard method of tracking cha...