The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that almost 15 million people have died from the coronavirus or from its impact on overwhelmed health systems in the last two years, almost triple the official figure of six million deaths.
Most deaths occurred in Asia, Europe and America.
WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described the figure in a report Thursday as "sobering" because it should prompt countries to invest more in quelling future health emergencies.
Scientists commissioned by the WHO to calculate the actual number of deaths from COVID-19 between January 2020 and the end of 2021 estimated that there were
13.3 to 16.6 million deaths directly caused by the coronavirus
or attributed in some way to the impact of the pandemic. in health systems, such as
people with cancer
who could not receive treatment because hospitals were overwhelmed by coronavirus patients.
A worker digs a grave at the San Juan Bautista cemetery in Iquitos, Peru, in May 2022, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Rodrigo Abd / AP
These figures are based on country-reported data and statistical models.
The WHO has not broken down the figures to distinguish between direct and indirect deaths from COVID-19.
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“It may seem like a simple accounting exercise, but having these numbers is critical to understanding how to fight future pandemics and continue to respond to this one,” said Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist at the Yale School of Public Health, who was not linked. to the investigation.
For example, Ko said, South Korea's decision to invest in public health after suffering a severe MERS outbreak allowed it to escape the coronavirus with a per capita mortality rate about one-twentieth that of the United States.
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Exact numbers of deaths from the disease are problematic to calculate, accounting for only a fraction of the devastation wrought by the coronavirus, largely due to limited testing and differences in how countries count deaths. .
According to government figures reported to the WHO and a separate count by Johns Hopkins University, more than 6 million deaths have been recorded to date.
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Scientists at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington surmise that there were
more than 18 million deaths
from COVID-19 between January 2020 and December 2021 in a recent study published in the journal Lancet;
and a team led by Canadian researchers estimated that there were more than three million unaccounted for deaths in India alone.
Some countries, including India, have questioned the WHO's methodology for calculating coronavirus deaths, resisting the idea that there were many more deaths than were counted.
Earlier this week, the Indian government released new figures showing there were 474,806 more deaths in 2020 compared to the previous year, but did not say how many were related to the pandemic.
It did not publish any death estimates for 2021, the year in which the highly infectious delta variant swept through the country, killing many thousands of people.
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Ko said the improving WHO figures could also explain some lingering mysteries about the pandemic, such as why Africa appears to have been one of the least affected by the virus, despite its low vaccination rates.
"Were the mortality rates so low because we couldn't count the deaths or was there some other factor that explained it?" alone they were insufficient to contain a global outbreak.
Bharat Pankhania, an expert at Britain's University of Exeter, said we may
never know the true number of victims of COVID-19,
especially in poor countries.
"When you have a massive outbreak where people are dying on the streets from lack of oxygen, bodies are left behind, or people have to be cremated quickly because of cultural beliefs, we end up never knowing how many people died," he explained. .
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Although Pankhania said the estimated death toll now still pales in comparison to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic - when experts estimate up to 100 million people died - he added that the fact that so many died despite advances of modern medicine, including from a certain point vaccinations, is
shameful.
He also warned that the cost of the coronavirus could be much more damaging in the long run, given the growing burden of long-lasting COVID-19.
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"With the Spanish flu, there was the flu and then there were some [lung] diseases that people got, but that was it," he said.
"There was no long-lasting immune condition like we're seeing now with COVID-19," he added.
"We don't know to what extent people with long-standing COVID-19 will have their lives shortened and if they will have repeated infections that cause even more problems," he concluded.
