Mexico boosts confirmed death toll by 4,272 to 227,840

Mexico announced Tuesday that a clinical review of past deaths has led officials to raise the country's confirmed COVID-19 death toll by 4,272, to a total of 227,840.

The adjustment was carried out by teams of doctors and is largely one of record keeping, because even government officials acknowledge Mexico's true pandemic death toll is far, far higher.

Because the country of 126 million people does so little testing, many Mexicans have died at home or never got a test. So the government performs two kinds of adjustments—one by teams of doctors reviewing case files and another computerized search of death certificates for mentions of symptoms related to COVID-19.

The quicker, computerized analyses of excess deaths related to COVID-19 now stand at over 350,088, which gives Mexico one of the highest per capita rates in the world.

The vast majority of the re-classified deaths announced Tuesday—3,924 of the 4,272—occurred in Mexico's first wave of coronavirus infectdions between March and June 2020.

© 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.