CDC to examine report putting US COVID deaths at more than 900,000

The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that the agency will look “carefully” at a new report that claims the true number of COVID-19 deaths in the US is more than 36 percent higher than the official total.

The analysis released Thursday by the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation gave the number of coronavirus deaths in the United States since March 2020 as 905,289 against an official total of 574,043. “We’ve known that the toll of this pandemic is not necessarily just those who’ve passed from COVID-19 specifically, but excess deaths relating to access to care, not presenting to care, and many other things,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters Friday. “So, we will look at this carefully, and then we will work within the CDC to make decisions as to whether to count them as excess or to count them as COVID-specific.”