“As many as 215,000 more people than usual died in the U.S. during the first seven months of 2020, suggesting that the number of lives lost to the coronavirus is significantly higher than the official toll.” — from https://apnews.com/a8e3244c77bcaf31efc826bbbe4a9d19
Note that the death toll in Wuhan, China, and in other countries has generally been found to be higher than the testing toll in later recounts. Because of the way COVID-19 struck, two things were true: early deaths were not necessarily recognized as COVID-19 deaths and testing was not able to keep up with the pandemic because nobody was prepared to test the population.
But, here is the thing about epidemiology. It works with overall statistics not just with individual testing. This is because sometimes, as with the numbers above, broad-based statistics can catch a trend that is missed by physicians, who correctly are focused on individual patients. It is the job of the epidemiologists to look for those broad based trends using statistical analysis to supplement the data from testing and observation.
That is how the extra deaths were caught, by statistical analysis. Since traffic deaths are down as are some other deaths, these statistics are not the result of extra deaths somewhere else. Rather, the above-average death toll is already 80% verified to be COVID-19. The other 20% comes from the statistical analysis and were probable positive deaths, but untested. While there is no way to prove those additional deaths as COVID-19, the probability is high.
This is the value of epidemiology. Not only do people in that field work in the lab, they also do field research, and they make heavy use of statistical analysis. This gives them the ability to draw overarching conclusions that are not able to be drawn by just a local approach or by simple observation by non-epidemiology physicians. Sadly, their conclusion is that it has been worse than we knew. Moreover, those are just extra deaths, it does not include–and cannot include–those who just thought they had a bad flu and did not go to a clinic. The bottom line is that, just like in Wuhan, we may have to wait until it slows down to recalculate the true cost of COVID-19.
Very well done, thank you!