Are there 'apps' that allow (or would allow) people around the world to declare known deaths related to Covid-19? The data quality would certainly be controversial, but this would be an interesting social as well as statistical process...
The reasoning for such an initiative (that could be seen as a contribution to "citizens' science), is to counter-act a systematic incompleteness and distorsion, visible since February 2020, in the way that the counting of "confirmed" infection cases and of "deaths" (in hospitals) and of numbers in "intensive care" (again, almost exclusively in hospitals), has crowded out the wider observation of the epidemic and its effects.
There is a flagrant phenomenon of statistical "horse and rabbit stew", which is relayed in permanence as a sort of journalistic schizophrenia. -- The "confirmed" infections, intensive care, deaths (etc.) numbers are given, day by day, with a spurious 7 significant figure format.
-- These super-precise institutional figures are, through the media, assorted with occasional commentaries and sporadic articles to the effect that the real figures are "almost certainly" (sic) much higher .... because of uncounted deaths in old peoples' homes, because of 'unconfirmed' deaths in the community, etc., etc.
The fact that the "real" figures are CERTAINLY much higher than the "official" (sic) institutional statistics, is the rather obvious elephant in the room. How can it be that, even after 3 months of continuous journalistic (and scientific) attention, there is still little more than false pudeur about the "difficulty" of getting the "true" numbers, about the need to look at the month-by-month trends of "excess mortality", and so on?
The answer to this question is certainly to b e sought, and found, at the level of institutional/ideological factors that are generating and maintaining (1) the "invisibility" of the deaths that are not administered by national health services and, as a corollary, (2) the invisibility of the "gap" between the official numbers and the 'true' facts. While waiting for the Hegelian tribunal of history to unmask these distorsions, why not exploit social networking in order to build "citizens' data bases declaring known deaths related to Covid-19? Or, is this already being done in some countries? If so, are there ways that it might be done in a concerted and more visible way (without being pirated by the GAFA & Co.)?
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