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Comment by newacct583 | Hacker News Reader

> One is clearly an undercount, one is clearly an overcount

In practice they're both very likely undercounts. In the developing world, many people die from illness without ever having been seen by a health care professional at all, or counted as anything.

It will be years before we have a good model for real infection rates and excess death statistics.

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Significant numbers of excess deaths are really, really easy to count. No complex model needed.

In the industrial world, sure. In Iran? I really doubt it. And even given good morgue and hospital reporting, there are confounding factors: we're dying more to covid but less to other causes due to the lockdowns. Or alternatively some conditions are harder to get treatment for and less likely to be well-diagnosed, etc...

I think I stand by "years" until we have a good consensus model for how the pandemic spread and what the effects were.

I'm pretty sure Iranians can count dead people, and they absolutely count as "industrial world." I've known a few Iranians in my day, and they didn't strike me as particularly incapable of things like counting the dead. People could do this before computers and heavy industry. You tend to notice dead bodies; they smell bad.

That's really all you need; a historical time series of dead people. Frankly, the US, Europe; it's the only data for Covid I look at any more because the rest of it is politicized and site specific, and a changing process over time.

For example:

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...

That's a specious interpretation of what I said, and frankly paints it in a racist manner that's more than a little offensive.

Obviously Iranians "can count". What developing nations don't have is a way to get all the dead COUNTED. Some old guy dies in a little village with little to no government services: who's job is it to "count" that death? How do you get that entered? Do you just trust cousin Farhad when he tells you at your office in slightly-larger-village three days laters? How do you know that's not the same death as this other person called in? The names are spelled differently, but maybe that's just a mistake?

Be serious here. Running a government is a hard problem. If it were easy, we wouldn't even have "developing" nations at all.

Iran is an industrial country. That's why Venesuela's economy crumbled after a year of sanctions and Iran's has endured decades: They produce a huge amount of their needs locally. It also has the most sophisticated healthcare system in the Middle East. It may not be as good as Western Europe, but it competes, or may exceed, the eastern Europe. To understand where Iran stands, you can consult [1] and get surprised that its output is not only more than the whole ME combined, but exceeds some countries in Europe.

[1] https://iranian-studies.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj619...

> What developing nations don't have is a way to get all the dead COUNTED

This is one of the most ridiculous, preposterous and ... bigoted assertions I've heard all day: of course the Iranians can count the dead. They were probably capable of it 2500 years ago under Cyrus. They're certainly capable of it today[0]. You realize the Iranians make stuff like cars[1], aircraft[2], and have successfully hacked "advanced" US stealth drones[3], right? And you think they can't count dead people?

[0]https://irandataportal.syr.edu/census

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry_in_Iran

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Aviation_Industries_Organ...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

In reality, where we can just look these statistics up rather than attempting to derive them from first principles based on axioms like "can build a car", Iran is one of a handful of countries with particularly low-quality death statistics. Regardless of how good Cyrus was at this, Iran's modern-day statistics are even lower than their upper-middle income status would predict. Maybe it was easier when there were fewer people living there.

Presumably you have some citation to back up "particularly low-quality death statistics" for the Iranians. I see no indication this is true, other than some people don't like the implications of what their death statistics say. It might be true, mind you: but citations needed.

You presume correctly.

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