The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 15 million people have been killed by either the coronavirus or its impact on congested health systems in the past two years, more than double the official death toll of 6 million. Most of the deaths are in Southeast Asia, Europe and America.
In a report released Thursday, UN chief Tedros Adanom Gebreyesus said the figure was “sobering” and should make countries invest more in their capacity to deal with future health emergencies.
Scientists commissioned by the WHO to calculate the actual number of Covid-19 deaths between January 2020 and the end of last year have estimated that there are between 13.3 million and 16.6 million deaths that are either directly caused by virus, or due to the impact of the pandemic on health systems, such as people with cancer, who cannot seek treatment when hospitals are full of Covid patients.
The figures are based on country-reported data and statistical modeling. The WHO did not immediately break the figures to distinguish between the direct deaths from Covid-19 and others caused by the pandemic.
“This may seem like a simple grain counting exercise, but having these WHO figures is so important to understand how we need to fight future pandemics and continue to respond to this one,” said Albert Co., a specialist in infectious diseases at the Yale School of Public Health, which is not related to the WHO study. For example, Ko said, South Korea’s decision to invest heavily in public health after a severe Mers epidemic allowed it to drive Covid-19 with a death rate of about 20 per capita in the United States.
Obtaining accurate death figures from Covid-19 was problematic during the pandemic, as the figures are only part of the devastation caused by the virus, largely due to limited testing and differences in the way countries report deaths.
According to government figures released by the WHO and a separate census conducted by Johns Hopkins University, more than 6 million coronavirus deaths have been reported so far.
Researchers at the Institute for Health Indicators and Evaluation at the University of Washington have estimated that there were more than 18 million deaths from Covid between January 2020 and December 2021, in a recent study published in the Lancet by a team led by Canadian researchers. , estimates that there are more than 3 million countless deaths from coronavirus in India alone.
Some countries, including India, have challenged the WHO’s methodology for calculating Covid’s deaths, opposing the idea that there are many more deaths than are officially reported. Earlier this week, the Indian government released data showing that there were 474,806 more deaths in 2020 than in the previous year, but did not say how many were related to the pandemic. India has not published any estimates of mortality for 2021, when the highly contagious version of Delta crossed the country, killing many thousands.
Ko said better WHO figures could also explain some enduring mysteries about the pandemic, such as why Africa appears to have been one of the least affected by the virus, despite low levels of vaccination. “Are mortality rates so low because we couldn’t count the deaths, or was there some other factor to explain it?” He said, adding that the crushing of deaths in rich countries like Britain and the United States that resources alone are insufficient to control a global outbreak.
Dr Bharat Panhania, a public health specialist at the British University of Exeter, said the real victims of Covid-19 may never be known, especially in poor countries.
“When you have a mass outbreak in which people die on the streets due to lack of oxygen, bodies are abandoned or people have to be cremated quickly because of cultural beliefs, in the end we never know how many people died,” he said. .
Although Panhania said the current death toll from Covid-19 was still pale compared to the 1918 flu pandemic – when experts estimated up to 100 million people had died – he said so many had died despite progress. modern medicine, including vaccines, was embarrassing.
He also said that the price of Covid-19 could be much more harmful in the long run, given the growing burden of long-term Covid.
“There was the flu with the Spanish flu and then there were some [lung] diseases that people suffered, but that was it, ”he said. “There was no permanent immunological condition that we are currently seeing with Covid,” he said.
“We don’t know to what extent the lives of people with long-term Covid will be shortened and whether they will have recurrent infections that will cause them even more problems.
Kruti Patti in New Delhi contributed to this report
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