Current data suggest that wealthy countries have disproportionately more COVID-related deaths than poorer countries. However, developing countries might not have the capacity to report death tolls as accurately as developed countries. In the context of previous pandemics, it is also likely that developing countries have experienced much higher death tolls throughout this pandemic than is being reported. If this is the case, then any analysis of COVID-19 mortality is hampered by incomplete data. As such, we may not know the association between regime type and COVID-19 mortality until after the pandemic, if the data is more complete by then.