Finding Mexico City’s real death toll
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mexico City’s official Covid 19 death toll did not seem to reflect the full extent of the crisis that hit the country in the spring of 2020 - this is according to Laurianne Despeghel and Mario Romero. These two ordinary citizens used publicly available data to show that excess deaths during the crisis - that’s the total number of extra deaths compared to previous years - was four times higher than the confirmed Covid 19 deaths.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to More or Less, with a show that tries to make the world add up, and |
| 0:05.6 | I'm Tim Halford. This week we bring you the story of how two people who had never met |
| 0:11.1 | in person worked together to find out just how bad things were in Mexico City during the |
| 0:17.2 | first wave of the pandemic last spring. In mid-March 2020, Mexico announced its first official |
| 0:24.5 | COVID death. A few weeks later, in late May, the total official death toll in the country's capital |
| 0:31.7 | was around 1800, but among data geeks something didn't sit right. What we could see in Mexico was, |
| 0:39.2 | testing was really low. We had a very high fatality rate in Mexico, about 8% compared to 1% in the |
| 0:46.8 | rest of the world. Many tests were coming up positive. This is L'Orián despegel, an economist by day, |
| 0:57.9 | but by night something of a data detective. That high fatality rate wasn't because COVID was more |
| 1:07.2 | dangerous in Mexico. It was because testing was limited. Lots of cases were being missed, especially |
| 1:13.6 | the milder ones, but probably many severe cases too. So probably we had many people that were dying |
| 1:22.8 | of COVID and were not labeled as such. Because of low testing, it would be very hard to find out |
| 1:30.7 | how many people were really being affected by COVID-19. But an event in her childhood gave L'Orián |
| 1:37.8 | an idea of what she wanted to find out. When I was young in France, there was a heatwave, and many |
| 1:43.6 | people died, and the only way that we had to know the extent of the phenomenon was to look at |
| 1:49.8 | all-cause death in the variation of the year 2003 against other years. To do this, you look at deaths |
| 1:57.2 | in the current period and compare them to the typical numbers of deaths in earlier years. The |
| 2:02.4 | difference is known as excess deaths. Because many countries have struggled to carry out sufficient |
| 2:08.2 | testing, in fact almost all countries in the first wave, looking at excess deaths allows experts |
| 2:14.4 | to see the impact of the pandemic. It includes not only direct deaths, but also indirect deaths. |
| 2:22.2 | But Mexico only publishes official mortality figures in the October following a full calendar year. |
| 2:29.2 | So excess deaths in March and April of 2020 wouldn't be reported until October 2021. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.