NEW: @martgnz and I have added four more countries to our excess-mortality tracker: Sweden, Belgium, Austria and Turkey (using data from Istanbul only). (1/9) https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/16/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries

Starting with Turkey: Istanbul’s government data for burials show 2,800 excess deaths from March 16th to April 19th. Assuming that the city had half of Turkey’s 2,000 official covid-19 deaths in that time, the government figures are picking up ~35% of the excess. (2/9)

(Post-script for Turkey: it has not released a regional breakdown of official covid data since April 1st, when Istanbul had 40% of national deaths and 55% of confirmed cases.) (3/9)

Sweden has received lots of attention for not locking down. As of April 7th, it was yet to show a more dramatic increase in total deaths than other European nations. Its official covid toll captured 71% of the 780 excess fatalities. (4/9)

Belgium has one of the highest per-capita official death tolls. Even though that figure includes “suspected” covid-19 deaths too, it still only captured 1,400 of 2,800 excess deaths as of April 5th, a rate of 50%. (5/9)

Austria locked down early, and today has fewer than 500 official deaths. Up to April 5th, we found that the official figures captured 57% of the excess deaths, so the excess now might be closer to 1,000. (6/9)

You might have seen the Istanbul figures reported this morning by @nytimes. They’ve included them in their excess-mortality tracker, launched today by @atmccann. It makes for grim but insightful reading - good to see more of this data published. (7/9) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html

On a similar note, take a look at @jburnmurdoch’s public Google Sheet containing sources for total mortality. John has done some really crucial work on covid-19 data, and I believe the @FT are going to start reporting excess deaths too. (8/9) https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1252341809327423488

Thanks also to @MaxCRoser and @EricTopol for highlighting the importance of using excess-mortality data. And @p_zalewski, @tom_nuttall and @mattsteinglass for comments on the latest figures. (9/9)

For a summary of the data in the other countries we are tracking - including Italy, Spain, France, UK, US, Netherlands and Indonesia - see this thread from earlier today. (10/9) https://twitter.com/J_CD_T/status/1252518957963268096