ABOVE: Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil
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Brazil is a major new epicenter of COVID-19—but the official figures don’t tell the whole story. That’s what researchers have concluded after combing through public death notice data from the second most-populous state in the country and comparing it to officially reported figures.
A team of scientists examined data gleaned from public notary death notices—legal documents required for arranging a burial—in Minas Gerais state and published their results in a preprint on medRxiv May 23. They found that notaries recorded 201 COVID-19 deaths in March and April, versus 65 COVID-19 deaths reported in official statistics via a government system called The Notifiable Diseases Information System (SINAN). There is generally a lag between these data sources, but the team also found that notaries had recorded an unexpected surge of deaths due to other respiratory illnesses. The authors write that they suspect hundreds of ...
