LIKELY WORSE NOW THAT WE'VE RELAXED:

We are part of a team of researchers at Boston University, University of Minnesota, University of California San Francisco and other institutions who have been tracking Covid-19 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.

A major goal for our team has been to assess whether the undercounting of Covid-19 deaths has occurred, and if so in which parts of the country.

One way to examine the issue is to look at what population health researchers call excess mortality. It's a measure that, in this case, compares the number of deaths that occurred during the pandemic to the number of deaths that would have been expected based on pre-pandemic trends.

Excess mortality captures deaths that arose from Covid-19 directly or through indirect pathways such as patients avoiding hospitals during Covid-19 surges. While determining a cause of death can be a complex process, recording whether or not someone died is more straightforward.

For this reason, calculations of excess deaths are viewed as the least biased estimate of the pandemic's death toll.

As a general rule of thumb - with some important caveats that we explain below - if there are more Covid-19 deaths than excess deaths, Covid-19 deaths were likely overestimated. If there are more excess deaths than Covid-19 deaths, Covid-19 deaths were likely underestimated.

In a newly released study that has not yet been peer-reviewed, our team found that during the first two years of the pandemic - from March 2020 to February 2022 - there were between 996,869 and 1,278,540 excess deaths in the US.

Among these, 866,187 were recognized as Covid-19 on death certificates. This means that there were between 130,682 and 412,353 more excess deaths than Covid-19 deaths.

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