Medical workers wearing personal protective equipment wheel bodies to a refrigerated trailer serving as a makeshift morgue at the Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in New York on Monday.

John Minchillo/AP

Gov. Andrew Cuomo releases an official coronavirus death toll for New York each day. But that number includes only people who tested positive for the virus and later died.

As of Friday morning, Johns Hopkins University had tallied 5,150 COVID-19 deaths in New York City.

Health officials told The New York Times that the true number of deaths is likely much higher.

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About 120 death workers and US soldiers work around the clock to pick up as many as 280 bodies a day from New York City homes, according to The New York Times.

While many of these people likely died of the coronavirus, their deaths are probably not counted in the official death toll, The Times' Ali Watkins and William Rashbaum reported on Friday.

New York City and the state count their deaths differently. The state tally is based on hospital data, which includes people who tested positive for the virus and died in the facilities, The Times reported.

In the city, any person who tests positive and later dies at home or in a hospital is counted, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the commissioner of the city's Department of Health, told The Times.

A worker with PPE.

REUTERS/Brendan Mcdermid

Individual hospitals, too, might have different methods of data collection, The Times reported.

"To date, we have only been recording on people who have had the test," Barbot told The Times.

The problem is that there is currently no clear way of counting the untested people who died at home and were presumed to have COVID-19 in the official tolls — and that number is significant.

The Times reported that in the first eight days of April, 1,891 people died at home or in the streets in New York City, adding that "paramedics are not performing coronavirus tests on those they pronounce dead."

While some of those people died of reasons unrelated to the virus, right now we don't know how many people that might be.

"I don't know how many more bodies I can take," Patrick Marmo, a funeral-home operator in Brooklyn, previously told Business Insider's Dave Mosher. "No one in the New York City area possibly has enough equipment to care for human remains of this magnitude."

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As of Friday morning, Johns Hopkins University had tallied 5,150 COVID-19 deaths in New York City.

The coronavirus 'is the tragic "X" factor here'

Workers wearing PPE wheeling a body.

REUTERS/Brendan Mcdermid

"The driver of this huge uptick in deaths at home is COVID-19," New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told The Times. "And some people are dying directly of it, and some people are dying indirectly of it, but it is the tragic 'X' factor here."

Before the pandemic, protocols were in place to determine a cause of death — but during a crisis of this magnitude, those are often abandoned, The Times reported.

Because of that, the differences in data collection, and likely comorbidities — like a person with COVID-19 having a heart attack — calculating an accurate death toll is a challenge at best, the newspaper said.

Dr. Howard Markel, a professor of medical history at the University of Michigan, told The Times that it's nearly impossible to grasp the full scale of a pandemic in real time.

"You have an idea of what numbers are, but you don't have an exact source," Markel said.

"Even if we're underestimating deaths and cases, particularly in the New York situation, there are enough of both to tell us this is very serious," he added. "It's already all hands on deck."

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