The US stats were pretty messed up, it will be clear in 5-10 years that the US didn't do significantly worse than similar countries, they just counted differently.

The article doesn’t make this clear, strangely, but it looks like adopting this new standard will make the death count go from roughly 100,000 to 85,000.

If my math is correct, it's from 27,000 to 23,000?

Whoops, I misread. I was scanning quickly because the article is clearly trying to bury the number.

Here’s the proper quote:

“As of 5 p.m. Wednesday, Massachusetts health officials had recorded 23,708 confirmed and probable COVID-19 deaths since the outbreak first began, so that figure is likely to drop to around 20,000 on Monday.”