Actually, it is most likely much higher. A lot of countries are putting cause of death as anything but Covid-19 for political reasons. For instance, my wife's cousin is married to a woman from Kazakhstan. Her father just died of "Pneumonia." Apparently, Kazakhstan is currently having a huge spike of "Pneumonia" deaths relative to other years. It's the same with some states in America. Texas and Florida, as examples, have 4x the Pneumonia deaths of other years. We probably won't ever know the true death rate.
my mother is ex-doctor of ambulance and I have information from the first hand (she has info from younger ex-collegues who continue to work on ambulance so I have the same info). May be some countries 'are putting cause of death as anything but Covid-19 for political reasons', concretely in Russia they are putting any cause of death as covid if the covid test is positive, and namely for political reasons. What reasons? So, they (government) have to explain
1/ why they ignore the opinion of most respected virus scientists about negative effect of total 'self-isolation' and 'mask rule' and overestimation of covid danger
2/ why 100s of caffes in Moscow (and other cities of course) are closed and their place is taken by brand new caffes owned by friend of president of Russia
3/ why corrupted officials made enormous money in period of 'self isolation' because they stole budget money which are free because the city infrastructure was underused. Example - the head of supply department of one of the bus stations of Moscow putted in the pocket 400.000$ in period of 'self isolation'. His official salary is about 1500$ or so. How? Simple. The bus full of people (in normal period) consumes several times more fuel than an empty bus (in period of isolation), but the money are already paid from budget many months ahead... and there are 100's buses under management. The same is for any infrastructure object. If small official from bus park pocketed 400K, how much money pocketed by corrupted top official???
Corruption is illness of Russia, but the covid 'pandemia' is golden, brilliant age of corruption, and they want to last it forever... really they prolonged it until the final point, when people became ready to go to the street...
4/ why the parks were closed, small shops were closed, but the same time big retail stores were overcrowded - I've seen it by my own, no social distance at all - guess why???? again simple - the park consumes money from budget, retail store generates money - taxes (legal money) and direct payment to corrupted officials (illegal). So close parks and pocket the money related to park maintenance but let the retail stores to generate money - for the same reason
5/ why, why, why.....
this 'pandemia' smells like s;%t - it smells lie, corruption, unbelivable level of violation of human rights, etc
and once again - it is all about the money
'We probably won't ever know the true death rate' - 100% agree