Two years ago to the day, the World Health Organization announced that the Covid epidemic had become a pandemic.
Between the beginning of 2020 and the end of 2021, it would have caused 18.3 million deaths, according to a study published this Friday in the journal The Lancet.
That is more than three times the official balance sheet.
“Official statistics on Covid-19 deaths only give a partial picture of the true death toll” linked to the pandemic around the world, observe the authors of the study.
Covid-19 is potentially one of the leading causes of death in 2020 and 2021, they say.
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While the official figure counts 5.94 million deaths worldwide between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2021, various works have deemed it to be highly underestimated and have attempted to better assess the overall assessment of the pandemic.
Based on the excess mortality and correcting it statistically, for example in countries that suffered heat waves, the authors of the study established that SARS-CoV-2 had killed, between January 1 2020 and on December 31, 2021, 17.1 to 19.6 million people.
The excess mortality due to Covid would therefore be 120.3 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, reaching 300 in 21 countries.
Excess mortality corresponds to the difference between the number of people who died, regardless of the cause of their death, and the number of deaths expected, based on past data.
In Russia and Mexico, a colossal excess mortality
Russia holds, in the models of the authors of the study, the record for excess mortality: 374.6 additional deaths, for each fraction of 100,000 inhabitants of its population, compared to the average of other comparable years, and this well before the invasion in Ukraine, which resulted in many military losses.
Mexico holds the sad second place on this podium, with an excess mortality of 325.1 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Brazil, whose hospital system can be thought to suffer, in certain regions, from structural deficiencies and where the Covid has been used as a political weapon, would record an excess mortality of 186.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, a level comparable to the United States. (179.3), where the health situation is much better but where obesity was a very aggravating factor.
“Six other countries individually recorded more than an estimated 250,000 additional deaths during this period,” say the study authors.
Bangladesh should have recorded 413,000 deaths;
Peru, which was for a long time the most affected country in relation to its population, 349,000;
South Africa, where the Omicron variant emerged and with a large immunocompromised population, 302,000;
Iran 274,000, followed by Egypt (265,000), and Italy 259,000, 100,000 more than the overall figure officially recorded as of March 10, 2022. “These heavily affected countries are spread across all regions of the world, strengthening the evidence for the truly global nature of the pandemic,” the authors analyze.
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The difference between the excess mortality and the Covid-19 deaths recorded could be explained by an under-diagnosis of infections by the coronavirus, and/or by deaths from other diseases higher than anticipated under the effect changes in behavior or less access to care because of the pandemic, according to the researchers.
They note that logically, confinement and social exclusion measures have had a positive impact on road deaths - as evidenced by the French figures - when people with chronic diseases were able to die from them more quickly given the difficult access to care other than Covid at certain times.
The World Health Organization has so far estimated, taking into account the excess mortality directly and indirectly linked to Covid-19, by the poverty created by the pandemic in particular, that the toll of Covid-19 could be two to three times higher than the official figure.
Based on the work of two researchers, the weekly The Economist had estimated the overall toll of the pandemic at 18 million deaths as of December 27, 2021. Not far, therefore, from the Lancet study.
