“It is a highly contagious new pathogen, which can spread rapidly and must be considered capable of causing a huge social, economic and health impact anywhere.
It is not SARS and it is not the flu.
This said the World Health Organization in the report of its mission in China on February 24.
At that time, the Asian country had 2,595 dead and was controlling the situation in Wuhan.
In the rest of the world, there were only 19 deaths and it was unknown that seven months later they would exceed one million.
The graph shows the number of daily deaths that have been officially confirmed since the beginning of the epidemic, by countries and continents.
There was a first expansive phase (which carried the virus everywhere), a slowdown before the summer (due to strict confinements) and then an uneven flow of deaths between countries, but constant at a global level.
Thus the first million deaths have been reached.
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In less than nine months, the covid-19 pandemic has reached a symbolic death toll in the world that will continue to grow as long as science does not find an effective vaccine
Just a million?
The above data is official.
But they are necessarily incomplete.
The total death toll will be higher and will take years to determine.
In some countries we have a better estimate thanks to civil registries.
In Spain, for example, official deaths from covid-19 are around 31,000, but since March the records have observed about 56,000
deaths more than usual in previous years.
In this excess all deaths are counted, for any cause.
They will not all be sick with covid-19, because the spring health collapse or the fear of going to the hospital may have increased deaths from other pathologies.
But it is not controversial to attribute all the excess to the crisis.
The graph below compares the excess deaths in a dozen countries with their official COVID death figures:
In Spain the excess of deaths almost doubles the official figure.
But it is not the only country where it occurs.
The underestimation is worse in Latin American countries such as Peru, where official deaths are just 37% of those observed in the records, or in Ecuador and Bolivia, where they do not reach a fifth (20%), according to figures collected by the
New York Times
.
In Europe, the case of Portugal is striking: it has an excess of more than 6,000 deaths, but the official deaths do not add up to a third.
Spain (53%) appears alongside South Africa (47%) or the Netherlands (59%), behind the tighter counts of the United States, United Kingdom, Germany or Italy, whose official figures are around 70% of the excess of deaths observed.
Finally, there are countries such as Belgium, France, Brazil or Sweden, where the official figure is close to or even higher than the observed excess.
Official deaths in the 15 previous countries total 488,000, while the excess registered rises to 749,000.
The difference is 261,000 deaths, or 30% more.
Why these differences?
There are countries such as Spain, the United Kingdom or Italy that only count as deaths from covid-19 patients who have tested positive in PCR or similar tests.
That caused an understatement in the official figures, especially in the first wave: then thousands of people died without being tested, often far from even a hospital.
These deaths, however, will contribute to the excesses observed in the civil registries.
This problem is less in countries that were hit later or that had a good ability to test from the beginning of the epidemic.
In addition, in other countries the official figure also adds “suspicious” deaths from covid, when there are clear symptoms or a compatible diagnosis.
This is the case of Belgium or Germany, where official deaths and excesses are approaching.
In the case of Spain, there has been a somewhat hyperbolic debate that has a simple answer: the Government does not hide the dead, but it has not always communicated them clearly either.
It does not hide them, because if we know that there are an excess of 56,000 deaths in civil registries, it is precisely because that information is published by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) and the National Epidemiology Center (CNE), dependent on the Ministry of Health.
But at the same time it is clear that the figures have not always been clear.
Before the summer, for example, an erroneous total of deaths was published for 15 days - which underestimated them - and then the official figure was frozen for several weeks.
More death figures could also have been added to the daily Health reports to avoid suspicions.
It is true that confirmed deaths are a standard metric that more countries use, but there is nothing to prevent also reporting figures of suspicious deaths or the excess mortality that is being registered.
These problems with numbers have occurred in many countries.
Especially at the beginning.
In August, for example, the United Kingdom changed the criteria with which it attributes deaths to the coronavirus: they stopped counting infected people who died after 28 days, which suddenly eliminated 5,000 deaths from the official statistics.
In Ecuador, Chile and Peru hundreds or thousands of deaths were added at once.
A final source of doubt is the figures for the countries with the fewest resources.
It is difficult to judge the accuracy of official data in countries like Ecuador, India, or parts of the African continent.
There are places with accurate statistics and others where they will be more deficient.
In most states there is still no information on civil registries or burials.
But that's something that will likely change.
The excesses of mortality registered will be known in many countries and as the months go by, the cost in lives of the pandemic will be more accurately measured.
Information about the coronavirus
- Here you can follow the last hour on the evolution of the pandemic
- This is how the coronavirus curve evolves in Spain and in each autonomy
- Download the tracking application for Spain
- Search engine: The new normal by municipalities
- Guide to action against the disease