Inferring the scale of China’s Covid spike through obituaries

China reported 80,000 Covid deaths since lifting restrictions in early December 2022. But researchers believe the count is much higher, because the figure only includes hospital deaths and the country does not require Covid testing as strictly as before. So, for The New York Times, Pablo Robles, Vivian Wang, and Joy Dong evaluated the change in scale of scholars’ obituaries, which appears to correlate with China’s restriction timeline.