American Institute Says Global Coronavirus Toll More Than Double the Official Number

By Staff, Agencies

An outfit whose statistical models were used to justify early Covid-19 lockdowns is now arguing that the true death toll of the pandemic is far higher than the official numbers – and closer to their own apocalyptic predictions.

Covid-19 has killed more than 900,000 Americans and over 6.9 million people worldwide, the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation [IHME] claimed on Thursday, citing their own statistical models based on excess mortality.

By contrast, official figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University list 3.24 million deaths globally, of which 580,000 are in the US, as of May 6.

IHME chief Dr. Christopher Murray explained in a series of videos that they used a “variety of statistical methods” to determine excess mortality, which was then weighed against six other factors to calculate whether it would have been due to the coronavirus or other causes.

They compared “anticipated deaths from all causes based on pre-pandemic trends with the actual number of all-cause deaths during the pandemic,” then removed the deaths both “indirectly attributable” to the pandemic and “averted” by the lockdowns.

“When you put all that together, we conclude that the best way, the closest estimate, for the true Covid death is still excess mortality, because some of those things are on the positive side, other factors are on the negative side,” Murray said.

The institute apparently suggests that official Covid data is not to be trusted – and their extrapolated “statistics” imply that some nations are even more untrustworthy than the others. For instance, they claim that Russia had almost six times more coronavirus deaths than its official numbers – almost as many as Brazil, whose official numbers are supposedly off by a third, again by IHME metrics.

By contrast, the UK “undercounted” its deaths by only 60,000 or so.