The Post counted 70 deaths from July heat domes. The true toll may not be known. Epidemiologists say country’s slow haphazard approach to assessing heat mortality makes that a dramatic undercount.

The country in question is the USA, if you were also curious.

But the preliminary death count from both these events probably underestimates the true impact of this summer’s heat, experts said — exposing the shortcomings of the United States’ slow and sometimes haphazard approach to assessing deaths from extreme temperatures. Most states rely on official death certificates, which can take weeks to be issued and often fail to identify heat as a contributing factor.

“These are mass mortality events,” said Kristie Ebi, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington’s Center for Health and the Global Environment. “But when we don’t know the numbers and people can’t see it … it’s hard on an individual level to understand that heat is deadly.”

Many European countries, by contrast, assess deaths from extreme temperatures by using an approach known as excess mortality analysis, which was also widely used during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. This method uses statistical analysis to assess how many more people died in a given period than would have been expected under normal circumstances, then estimates what portion of those deaths are attributable to heat.

European officials have attributed more than 10,000 excess deaths to the continent’s record-breaking June heat wave.