Official Coronavirus Figures Don't Reveal The True Scale of the Pandemic

At a news conference every evening, Jérôme Salomon, France's director general of health, solemnly delivers an update on the state of the coronavirus epidemic in the country -- just as public health officials around the world have been doing every day for weeks.

With each new tally of deaths and infections, news organizations and public health institutions like Johns Hopkins University in Maryland update their maps and charts depicting the pandemic's severity and spread. The latest figures show that more than 13,000 people have died in Italy, the epicenter of the outbreak in Europe, followed by Spain and France. In the United States, the coronavirus has now killed more people than the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Last week, however, Salomon's terminology changed slightly. Rather than simply relaying the total number of deaths in France, as he had been doing, he specified that the daily tally reflected only deaths that had been recorded in hospitals.

The official figures "represent only a small part of deaths" in France, Salomon admitted. He acknowledged that "the two main places of death are the hospital and nursing homes." A system for tallying deaths in nursing homes is planned for the coming days, but it is not yet operational.

Well, we now have some numbers for nursing homes deaths in France: 1416 as of yesterday, but a significant number of homes haven't been tallied yet.