Mexico coronavirus: The math geeks who figured excess deaths washingtonpost.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from washingtonpost.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Print article MEXICO CITY - The mystery surfaced early in the pandemic. Hospitals were jammed with coronavirus victims, but the official death count in Mexico City appeared suspiciously low. Sitting at her dining-room table one afternoon, Laurianne Despeghel, a 31-year-old economic consultant, clicked from chart to chart on her laptop, puzzling over how to uncover the real toll. “I think the data exist,” she typed to Mario Romero Zavala, a fellow math geek. She’d heard that death certificates were stored in a database at the city’s civil registry. But it would be tough to crack. A day later, Romero Zavala messaged back with an idea. “I’m going to hurry,” the 37-year-old software developer wrote. “I think by tomorrow morning we’ll have the data.”
WOW!!! Despeghel typed. Thus began a cat-and-mouse game with the government that would last nearly a year and catapult the pair to national prominence. Just days after their conversation, they d conclude that around 8,000 more people had died in Mexico s capital in the first five months of 2020 compared to prior years. By February 2021, they d count 83,235 excess deaths - more than twice the government s confirmed Covid-19 fatality total. Around the world, citizen sleuths have been scrambling to discover the pandemic s true toll. As fatalities have soared, they ve upstaged governments that have been slow or unwilling to report the scale of the tragedy.