According to an analysis of global excess deaths released Thursday by the World Health Organization, an estimated 14.91 million people died worldwide in 2020 and 2021 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The estimate — with a 95 percent confidence interval of 13.3 million to 16.6 million — is significantly larger than the number of reported deaths directly caused by COVID-19 at the time, which was about 5.42 million according to official counts. . But excess mortality estimates try to capture the pandemic’s true toll: direct and indirect deaths. The estimate is made by comparing the number of deaths during a period to the number of deaths expected to occur during that period based on historical mortality data and modelling. Such modeling also takes into account historical differences, such as fewer traffic and flu deaths during the pandemic due to movement and health restrictions.
Thus, the excess mortality estimates aim to capture not only reported COVID-19 deaths, but also unreported COVID-19 deaths and deaths indirectly caused by COVID-19. That could include people dying from preventable, non-COVID diseases because they delayed or avoided healthcare for fear of getting infected, or because their healthcare system was overloaded with COVID-19 patients and unable to provide optimal care. offer.
“These sobering data points not only to the impact of the pandemic, but also to the need for all countries to invest in more resilient health systems that can support essential health services during crises, including stronger health information systems,” said WHO Director-General Dr. So says Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a statement.
The estimates may point to the countries that struggled to respond to the pandemic and the actual devastating toll.
India, for example, is said to have postponed the publication of the WHO analysis for months due to a dispute over the estimates. The WHO estimates that in India in 2020 and 2021, 4.74 million people died as a result of the pandemic, almost a third of the total global death toll from a pandemic. India previously reported only about 481,500 deaths during that period.
In all, only 10 countries were responsible for 68 percent of the additional deaths: India, Russia, Indonesia, the US, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Turkey, Egypt and Iran. The analysis also broke down the excess deaths by gender and age, finding that men were responsible for more of the additional deaths (57 percent men) as were older adults. All data can be found here.
According to the analysis, the additional death toll in the US was nearly 932,500 by the end of 2021. The country reported just over 848,000 deaths directly caused by COVID-19 during that period, while reported deaths from COVID-19 now stand at 997,000. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have their own estimate of excess deaths for the pandemic, which now stands at about 1.12 million.
