A person walks past a mural depicting US President Donald Trump as the Grim Reaper on a wall on Houston Street in New York City October 20, 2020. | Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

Deaths from all causes — not just Covid-19 — are up since the pandemic started, a CDC report found.

The official Covid-19 mortality figures might be dramatically underestimating the real death toll of the pandemic in the US, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

From late January to early October, nearly 300,000 “excess deaths” occurred in America, the report authors estimate. That’s about a third more than the 216,025 coronavirus deaths the US reported in the same period.

Excess mortality is a figure that simply calculates how many more people died, of any cause, in a given period and place than what