MEXICO CITY, MEXICO - JULY 15: (EDITORS NOTE: Image depicts death.) A crematorium worker takes the body of a person who died from COVID-19 to the ovens to be cremated at the San Isidro Crematorium in Azcapotzalco on July 15, 2020 in Mexico City, Mexico. The crematorium is receiving 20 corpses a day, when before the pandemic received an average of five. Mexican Health Secretary announced the country has over 36,000 victims from COVID-19, surpassing Italy but behind US, Brazil and UK. According to Johns Hopkins University, Mexico has registered 311,486 positive cases. Critics say Government started reopening economy too soon and this would increase number of victims. At the beginning of the pandemic, President Lopez Obrador had been accused of downplaying the effects of the virus to protect economic activity. (Photo by Hector Vivas/Getty Images)
Supera México los 200.000 fallecimientos por covid-19
00:55 - Source: CNN
Mexico City CNN  — 

Mexico’s government has released a new report that shows nearly 120,000 victims of Covid-19 may have gone uncounted until now – a finding which would raise the country’s death toll from the virus by nearly 60%.

The new Health Ministry report suggests that a total of more than 321,000 people have likely died from Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.

This conclusion is at odds with the much lower figures that the same ministry has been reporting every day until now – as recently as Saturday, only 201,429 Covid-linked deaths were reported as “confirmed.”

The report, titled “Excess Mortality in Mexico,” measures the number of deaths since the start of the pandemic which exceed projections based on previous years.

It was most recently updated on March 15, though a Health Ministry spokesperson declined to comment on when the report was first released to the public.

The report finds that from the start of the pandemic up to February 14, 2021, there were 294,287 deaths linked to Covid-19.

Since then, from February 15 up until Saturday, there have been 27,223 additional Covid-19 deaths, according to a CNN analysis of health ministry data, which makes for a total of 321,510 deaths in the country.

According to data from this new report, Mexico’s death toll would be higher than Brazil’s and would place the country as second worst-hit in the world, following the US.

In total, the report identified 417,002 “excess deaths” since the pandemic began, of which 70.6% are estimated to be related to Covid-19.

Mexico’s health authorities have not yet indicated whether they will begin counting the country’s estimated excess deaths in its daily death toll updates.