So many people were dying that it was obvious the governments numbers couldnt be accurate. Calls to pick up bodies were inundating the countrys forensic office. By July, agents were gathering up to 150 bodies per day, 15 times the usual amount in previous years, said Bolivias chief forensic official, Andrés Flores.
The demand on his office suggested that the official tally of Covid-19 deaths now just over 4,300 was a vast undercount, Mr. Flores said. But with limited testing, scarce resources, and a political crisis that is tearing the country apart, the extra lives lost were going largely unrecognized.
The likelihood of underreported cases and death tolls has been a concern in several places, including the United States, as testing kits have been in limited supply and some sick people have avoided hospitals, fearing the prospect of being cut off from loved ones.
But the turmoil in Bolivia appears to have made many of its infected citizens particularly vulnerable to being overlooked.
New mortality figures reviewed by The New York Times suggest that the real Covid-19 death toll there is nearly five times the official tally, indicating that the country has had one of the worlds worst coronavirus outbreaks. The extraordinary rise in deaths there during the pandemic, adjusted for the countrys population, is more than twice as high as that of the United States, and far higher than the increases in Britain, Italy and Spain.
About 20,000 more people in a country of only about 11 million have died since June than in past years, according to a Times analysis of registration data from Bolivias Civil Registry.read more
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