There is a difference between not capturing every death and the deliberate misreporting of deaths by a government — like putting 250 bodies in a mass grave and claiming only 5 people died.
There have been stories from Iran with pictures of large mass graves being dug & filled while the government was reporting low COVID deaths.
I've seen the mass graves, just like the ones in NYC. I don't remember "reporting of low deaths" in either case.
"While the government tries to hide the numbers, mass graves tell the truth." The Chicagoan Fact-Checking Iran’s COVID-19 Death Toll According to the government’s own numbers, Iran is one of the hardest-hit countries in the world. But Ahmad Obali thinks the truth is much worse. http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/April-2020/Ahmad-Obali-Iran-Coronavirus-Deaths/ Last weekend, Al Jazeera reported that the total number of COVID-19 cases in Iran had surpassed 50,000, according to the country’s own figures. Three thousand had died — a pace of six deaths every hour. Those numbers make Iran one of the hardest-hit countries in the world. The New York Times, among others, has argued that the U.S. government should ease sanctions against Iran to help combat the crisis. Despite all that, Ahmad Obali is sure those numbers are wrong. As terrible as they are, he believes that the truth is far, far worse. “Instead of managing the cases, they’re managing the numbers,” says Obali, an émigré from Iran’s Azeri-speaking region who now lives in Wilmette. He knows this because he doesn’t rely on numbers reported by the government, but on his own team of stringers on the ground in Iran. They help him collect information for his news broadcasts for Günaz TV, an independent Azeri-language satellite station he runs. (More at above url)
Mr. Obali sounds like quite the authority on statistics and the inner workings of the Iranian government. The Iranian & Chinese reported numbers seemed to have become a growing problem now that ours put theirs to shame. It's not like they have heads of state who vocalized their opposition to having the "numbers go up".