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Hi and welcome to COVID Quickly, a scientific American podcast series.

This is your Fast Track Update on the COVID pandemic. We bring you up to speed on the science

behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease. We demystify the research and

help you understand what it really means. I'm Tony Lewis and I'm Josh Fishman. We're a scientific

American senior health editors. Today we're going to explain how COVID deaths have been seriously

undercounted in many parts of the US. And we'll discuss the raging debate over the origins of

the pandemic causing virus, a wild animal or a sloppy human lab. We know that COVID has caused

an unthinkable number of deaths, more than half a million in the US alone. But you've been looking

at new research, Tonya, and could the true number of deaths during the pandemic be even larger?

Yes, scientists have looked at the number of excess deaths or deaths beyond the amount you'd

expect in a typical year, and showed that there were far more deaths than usual in 2020

at the national and state levels. In a new preprint study, Andrew Stokes, a professor of

population health at Boston University and his colleagues, calculated excess deaths at the county

level. They found big disparities in how these deaths were attributed to COVID in different parts of

the country. Rural counties, especially ones in the south and west, had the highest rates of excess

deaths not attributed to COVID. Some of these were likely COVID deaths that were misattributed to

...