The French State has not recorded all deaths caused by the coronavirus in recent years and the French authorities have also acknowledged that not all deaths have been recorded. According to the AFP agency on 26 March, so far the mortality figures mentioned in France include those who died in hospitals but not those who died in nursing homes and private homes. This harsh reality has been publicly acknowledged on 24 March by the Director-General of the French Ministry of Health, Jérôme Solomon

Thus, it is clear that, according to the Director-General himself, "the numbers of deaths in hospitals probably represent a small part of the total mortality". Solomon has promised that as of next week a daily follow-up of deaths in residences will be organised, based on the medical declarations of these residences.

With regard to information on deaths in homes, the Director-General has explained that they are declared in the civil registry and are delayed in the passage from registration to statistics. Solomon has explained that they have asked those in charge of the records to expedite the passage of information by municipalities, departments and counties. In fact, the information collected by the registry could have led to the detection of a high number of deaths that were causing coronavirus in Altsace and in general in the Grand Est region (Greater East).

Therefore, if this is the case, from the end of March the figures and calculations of mortality offered by France should be more reliable than now. It will not happen to the same extent with the reliability of the information of the contagion, since, as in many other places (including Spain and, therefore, in the whole of the Basque Country), not all those who have no symptoms are tested for Covid-19, let alone asymptomatic citizens who have been in contact with those who have symptoms.

Spain will also need to improve its accounting

The Spaniards who denounced that "France does not do the accounting well" received this Saturday, 28 July, the surprise they should have expected if they had thought it well: "A report from the Department of Health reveals that more than half of the deaths in Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla-León have been excluded from the computer for several days," the newspaper El País in its chronicle today reported "more deaths than those detected by coronavirus in Spain".

At 11:00 a.m. in Spain, Fernando Simón, Emergency Coordinator of the Ministry of Health, explains the latest data on deaths from the coronavirus transmitted by the autonomous communities. On Friday, 27 March, he reported that, until then, 4,858 people had died in the accident. "Reality, however," says El País, is tougher, according to a report by the Carlos III Health Institute. The document shows that the virus has almost doubled the usual mortality in different areas of Spain. The information that Simon gives every day shows only a part of the dimensions of the epidemic, as only the deceased patients count after they tested positive for COVID-19." The institute's report is based on data from the Surveillance Network on Excess Mortality from All Causes, which the Ministries of Health and Science have organized to gather information on mortality since 2008.

After analyzing the report, El País highlights the striking case of the autonomy of Castilla-León. In this autonomous community, 885 people died between 17 and 24 March, but the average recorded in previous years was 500. According to the Carlos III Health Institute, of those 385 abusive deaths (77% more), only 112 were declared by the administrations affected by COVID-19, less than a third of the remaining deaths. These deaths were recorded among common diseases such as pneumonia and were left without access to coronavirus records, as although they had suspicious symptoms there were no diagnostic tests at their disposal.

In another autonomous community, Castilla-La Mancha, Carlos III.ak recorded between 15 and 24 March 938 deaths, 75.5% more than expected from the usual data. Although the excess mortality recorded was 404 deaths, only half of them were detected by the daily computation of the administrations.

In Madrid, from 10 to 16 March, 1,318 deaths were recorded, 66% more than the 794 expected deaths. The Department of Health reported that the coronavirus has caused 192 deaths these days, but the excess mortality detected by Carlos III.ak is almost triple.

According to the report, in Spain there are also delays in the civil registration for the information of witnesses to reach central databases, including the courts of towns and cities that are full of insufficient and working people. This would explain that in a few days the deaths that are at the base of the excess mortality have been misaccounted, which must be attributed to COVID-19, both in the whole State and in those that have been detected in Aragon, Cantabria, Catalonia, Valencia, La Rioja, Galicia and Navarra Carlos III.ak.

First, Daniel Lopez, director of the World Health Organization's Health Crisis Commission (WHO), has admitted to El País that "these data confirm that we still lack much to have all the information about the epidemic. We knew that the actual number of infections is much greater than that detected. We now know that the deaths are also much more than the counts. The bottom line is that the incidence of the virus is being much more important than what the available data say."