Many Deaths During the Pandemic Were Simply Due to Lack of Access to Health Care
Patients rest in a hallway in the overloaded Emergency Room area at Providence St. Mary Medical Center on January 27, 2021, in Apple Valley, California.
Mario Tama / Getty Images
In calculating its human toll, a pandemic is similar to a war. The most precise way public health researchers can get a handle on the impact of something like COVID-19 is to compare the number of total deaths recorded in a specific place during the pandemic with death tallies from prior years.
That analysis will yield a figure known as “excess deaths” — which simply means deaths above and beyond what would normally be expected.