Workers at the municipal pantheon of San Efrén, in Ecatepec, State of Mexico, bury a man who died of coronavirus, on February 2, 2021.Nayeli Cruz
The tragedy of the pandemic in Mexico has left twice as many deaths as those that have been registered by the health authorities, according to estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Between 2020 and 2021, around 626,000 people died from the coronavirus health crisis, according to the latest report on excess mortality published this Thursday.
This figure is twice as high as the almost 300,000 deaths that official data showed at the end of last December.
The WHO calculations include both the people who died directly from covid-19 and those who died due to health failures resulting from the outbreak.
For example, those who could not be treated in time for other illnesses when the health system was overwhelmed.
The cost of health insufficiency in Mexico amounts to the same number of deaths registered directly due to the virus.
The authorities account for nearly 324,000 deaths to date since the start of the pandemic.
While according to the Government's own estimates, the excess deaths from the pandemic is approximately 657,000.
Mexico is not the only country that far exceeds the number of officially registered deaths with the WHO estimates.
According to the agency's most recent report, the number of deaths from covid-19 in the world is around 15 million, almost three times more than official data shows.
In the first two years of the pandemic, governments have reported just over 5.4 million deaths from the coronavirus.
Although more than two thirds of the global excess mortality linked to covid is concentrated in 10 countries, including Mexico, the gap between the authorities' records and the WHO estimates does not occur in all of them.
In the United States, Brazil and Peru, for example, the figures presented coincide in approximate numbers with the deaths reported by the authorities.
On the other hand, in India the estimates exceed 4.7 million deaths, while the authorities only reported 523,000.
The same disparity is observed in Egypt, where 24,000 deaths from covid-19 were recorded in that period, but WHO estimates exceed 250,000 deaths.
According to the report, the other countries hardest hit by the pandemic are Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt and South Africa.
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