• DEATHS: Mexico is only beginning to grasp the true death toll of the coronavirus pandemic, after the country’s independent statistics agency (INEGI) reported this week that there were at least 44 percent more coronavirus deaths in the first 8 months of 2020 that the government originally reported.
• COUNT: Counting death certificates from Mexico’s 32 state civil registrars that showed coronavirus as the cause of death, INEGI established that 108,658 people died from coronavirus between January and August of 2020. The country’s Ministry of Health had only reported 75,873 deaths.
• LIMITS: “A private hospital does not always notify the Ministry. (Federal records) do not include people looked after at home by private doctors nor collect data from state (governments) own systems”, said Malaquías López, professor at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM).
• DIMENSION: Even before INEGI presented its data, Mexico was already the fourth country in the world with the most coronavirus deaths in absolute terms when using Ministry of Health numbers. According INEGI, coronavirus was just behind heart disease among leading causes of death.
