[tzs]

In the case of COVID deaths there are a whole bunch of jurisdictions doing their own counting and reporting. City governments. County governments. State governments. The federal government. I believe there are also non-government entities such as health insurance providers and hospital networks providing data.

This limits how much governments that are reporting aggregates across their small jurisdictions within them such as state and even more so federal government can fudge the numbers without it being apparent to anyone who checks their sources.

Also there is non-death data that should decently correlate with deaths but is reported by different people which provides another check on the death numbers. For example, number of ICU COVID patients should move similar to number of COVID deaths. That data would come from admissions records or transfer records of hospitals.