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The Countries That May Have Faked Covid-19 Statistics
It may come as a surprise that for some countries, Covid-19 statistics may be entirely made up
Throughout the pandemic, there’s been a lot of debate and discussion about different countries’ reported Covid-19 statistics. Whether it’s explaining the difference in deaths between France and, say, Lithuania, or why Peru has a higher death count than other Latin American nations, or even just comparing places like the US and UK on their reported data, we’ve all been fascinated by global health information for the last 3 years.
And often this information is, perhaps unsurprisingly, flawed. Even before 2020, we knew that a lot of countries had difficulty putting together national statistics. It’s quite hard to monitor and report things like mortality in a rigorous and accurate way, because it requires time, money, and expertise that are often hard to come by in low-resourced settings.
There has even been a global effort for decades to assist nations with their vital statistics reporting because it just isn’t that easy a thing to do. It might surprise you to learn that in many countries it is still not uncommon for both births and deaths to be entirely unrecorded by the central government, which is a fairly big problem when it comes to knowing things like how many people have died of a specific infectious disease.
We knew about all of these issues prior to the pandemic. It’s nothing new to hear that we can’t really trust the officially reported Covid-19 death statistics from India, because excess death counts and other metrics reveal that many more people died than were officially recognized.
But something you may not have heard is that for some countries, the issues aren’t limited to difficulties with death recording and vital statistics systems — in some places, the data aren’t so much missing as potentially fake.
Yes, some nations have probably been making up their Covid-19 data entirely. And very few people are even aware that this is an issue.
