The only thing we know for certain about the pandemic is that it is worse than what the "official" numbers are

I suspect that many people have wondered just how accurate the COVID-19 numbers are. Does the fact the fifteen countries in the world with highest death rates are the U.S. and in Europe mean that their reporting is more “accurate”? Or the fact that only South Africa is in the top fifty outside of Western countries and Latin America is “meaningful”? Are we are to believe the relatively low numbers from east and Southeast Asia—especially China’s, which are likely for propaganda purposes? Or that Africa has a seeming “immunity” from the virus, with Nigeria with its densely-packed population of 210 million barely touched? Or that for months India reported almost no additional cases until recently, when there has been a surge of new cases far outpacing than the rest of the world?

It is fairly certain that getting an “exact” number is impossible, only that whatever the number is, it is “bad.” A recent Wall Street Journal analysis found that countries with more rigorous tabulations had three times the positivity and death rates as countries which did not. As early as this past summer the CDC was estimating that the number of people who were “positive” for the virus was likely 11 times the “official” number.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) asserts that “extreme undertesting and underreporting” renders estimates of the extent of the virus as unreliable, and that although reported deaths from the virus are a more reliable indicator of its spread, it notes that many countries (and in the U.S., states) have different interpretations of what qualifies as a COVID-related death. Frontiers in Public Health notes that despite the fact that it has reported the second highest number of deaths, there still may be significant underreporting in Brazil, in which a significant number of excess deaths have not been reported as virus-related—rather as by “respiratory insufficiency” and pneumonia—but which the virus is likely the underlying cause of such deaths.  

I have already discussed the issue of significant undercounting in India, and it is now seeing a “second” spike in cases that are such that in recent days constitute half the total daily rise in the world as a whole—proving that “herd immunity” works about as well as “trickle-down” economics. According to Aljazeera, this increase was due to “inadequate government measures and people not adhering to public guidelines, such as wearing face masks and maintaining social distancing.” This was a reckoning that could have been easily foreseen, and current number that suggests that only one-in-100 Indians have been infected is almost certainly an undercount by a factor of 10.

Through mid-March, the total number of cases in Africa is 4 million, which of course is barely a fraction the number recorded in the U.S. It has been suggested that the lower average age of the population, the climate, “swift action” to contain the virus, and the fact that there are few facilities for older people explains this. Climate, however, has been discounted as a factor and the usual suspects—undertesting and underreporting—accounts for much of the significantly lower numbers coming out of Africa. The availability of vaccines relative to developed countries should also be concerning.  

Meanwhile, The Los Angeles Times has reported that Mexico’s tardy response to the pandemic and the lack of mask-wearing requirements, as well as one of the lowest testing rates in the world, has taken a severe toll on the country, and officials have taken the rather extraordinary step of admitting that its current death count is 60 percent of what the actual number is, given the number of “excess” deaths compared to prior years.

And of course there is China, where this all started as early as October, 2019. There are reports that COVID cases went unreported because they were “handled” by “private” institutions which were not required to report them. Early on, cremation centers which normally only operated four hours a day were for weeks running round the clock, “disposing” of bodies at least six times the normal rate. It appears that China was hoping to "contain" the virus within its borders so as to hide it from the rest of the world, but was forced to reveal to the world the danger when Thailand reported the first case of the virus outside China in January, 2020. 

A report by MedRxiv.org last June charged that the actual infection numbers in Wuhan and elsewhere were more likely in the neighborhood of 2.2 million between the beginning of the outbreak and February 2020, and the total deaths of all causes of 36,000 was considerably higher than the “normal” total of 2,500—which “suggested” that total number of COVID deaths just in Wuhan and its environs was at least 10 times what was officially reported. Of course such numbers are “speculative,” but given the fact that China is a closed society that tightly controls information, it isn’t “difficult” for one to assume that China’s official numbers are both for public and international propaganda purposes.

Just what is the true number of COVID-19 cases and deaths will never be known, but the one certainty is that there have been severe and deliberate undercounts in many countries, even in countries which have more “reliable” data-gathering techniques and access to testing. Another “certainty” is that the current numbers reflect what governments in disparate countries are allowing the world to know, and perhaps it is also a measure of what people on the ground want to know themselves.