UN body says figure, more than twice previous official totals, should prompt countries to invest more in their capacity to quell future emergencies, says an article published in The Guardian.
Double death toll
Almost 15 million people worldwide have died as a result of the Covid pandemic, the World Health Organization has estimated – a figure more than double the official death toll.
The figure is based on the concept of excess mortality – the number of deaths that occurred beyond those expected without the pandemic – and encompasses both those who died as a result of Covid and those who died indirectly because of the pandemic.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO, described the figures as “sobering”, while Dr Jeremy Farrar, director of the UK-based health research foundation the Wellcome Trust, said that too often during the course of the pandemic, world leaders “have failed to act at the level needed to save lives”.
The WHO figures suggest that from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2021 there were between 13.3 million and 16.6 million excess deaths, with the vast majority – 84% – occurring in south-east Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Need for more resilient healthcare
The WHO also found that while 53% of the excess deaths occurred in lower-to-middle-income countries, only 15% occurred in high-income countries, and 4% in low-income countries. Sex and age also mattered, with 57% of the deaths occurring among males.
“These sobering data not only point to the impact of the pandemic but also to the need for all countries to invest in more resilient health systems that can sustain essential health services during crises, including stronger health information systems,” said Tedros.
The WHO suggested there had been about 5.42 million reported Covid deaths, while data from Johns Hopkins University put the toll at more than 6 million.
Methodology to calculate COVID
But the WHO notes that many Covid deaths will have been missed due to factors including a lack of testing and variations in death certification rules. Such figures also fail to take into account deaths that are indirectly ascribable to the pandemic – such as patients failing to receive care for other conditions because health services were overwhelmed or because they avoided healthcare services, perhaps because they were concerned about catching Covid or adding pressure to stretched services.
The new figures, the WHO reports, are based on both mortality data reported by countries and statistical modelling.
Some countries, including India, have disputed the WHO’s methodology for calculating Covid deaths, resisting the idea that there were many more deaths than officially counted.
Earlier this week, the Indian government released figures showing there were 474,806 more deaths in 2020 than the previous year, but did not put a figure on how many were linked to the pandemic. India did not release any death estimates for 2021, when the highly infectious Delta variant swept through the country, killing many thousands.
Global excess death
Prof John Edmunds, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said looking at excess deaths gave a more complete picture of the impact of the pandemic on overall deaths than looking at deaths due to Covid.
“Sadly, the figure of around 15 million deaths globally over the first two years of the pandemic is likely to be much more accurate than the 6 million or so confirmed deaths that have been recorded,” he said.
Edmunds added that models were necessary to produce excess death estimates, particularly for low-income countries where deaths are not routinely registered. But this can cause difficulties. “This is obviously problematic when you have large groups of countries with little or no relevant data, as we have in Africa,” he said, adding that as a result different researchers had produced different estimates, with one study suggesting there have been about 18m excess deaths globally.
However, Edmunds noted that while the estimates differ, the overall pattern is similar. “The true burden is likely to be much higher than the confirmed deaths figures, and middle-income countries have tended to fare the worst over the epidemic,” he said, suggesting that one reason why the lowest-income countries may not have had comparably large death tolls is that they do not have large numbers of elderly people.
Learning from crisis
Dr Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, said governments must learn from the crisis. “There can be no hiding from the fact this devastating death toll was not inevitable; or that there have been too many times in the past two years when world leaders have failed to act at the level needed to save lives. Even now a third of the world’s population remains unvaccinated,” he said, adding that more must be done to protect people from the ongoing pandemic and future risks.
“Governments must learn from this crisis and act immediately to end this pandemic.”
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Source: The Guardian
