Experts: Using death certificates alone undercounts COVID-19 fatalitiesA group of experts from Stanford and Harvard universities, as well as the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, propose a new model for measuring direct, indirect, and excess deaths from COVID-19 in the United States, and they say relying solely on death certificates likely undercounts the true death toll COVID-19 has taken in the United States.
Their proposal is published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.The authors write that, before a standardized case definition was published in early April and testing rates were very low, practitioners likely did not attribute all deaths in patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 to COVID-19.