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According to a study that found stark differences across countries and regions, the death toll from the pandemic maybe three times higher than official Covid-19 records suggest.
According to the first peer-reviewed global estimate of excess deaths, as many as 18.2 million people died from Covid in the first two years of the pandemic. They cited a lack of testing and untrustworthy mortality data to explain the disparity with official estimates of approximately 5.9 million deaths.
“At the global level, this is quite the greatest mortality shock since the Spanish flu,” said Christopher J.L. Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, where the study was conducted. In an interview, Covid stated that he was responsible for a 17 percent increase in deaths worldwide. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed at least 50 million people.
The findings, published in the medical journal Lancet, concentrated on excess deaths in order to avoid undercounting and assessing the extent of the pandemic’s devastation. While deaths continued to pile up, the researchers compared mortality between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2021, to comparable data from previous years.
According to the researchers, the evidence suggests that the increase in mortality is a direct result of Covid-19. However, some deaths may have occurred indirectly as a result of a lack of access to health care and other essential services during the pandemic, or as a result of behavioral shifts that led to suicide or drug abuse, they said.
“Studies from several countries, including Sweden and the Netherlands, indicate that Covid-19 was the direct cause of the majority of excess deaths,” said Haidong Wang, an assistant professor of health metrics sciences at the Seattle-based institute, in a statement. “Knowing the true death toll from the pandemic is critical for making effective public health decisions.”
Improving data on deaths can provide governments with a clearer picture of how to best direct efforts to protect their citizens, according to Jennifer Ellis, who leads Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Data for Health program, which works with low- and middle-income countries to strengthen information gathering.
Bloomberg Philanthropies is a charitable organization founded by Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.
Death Tracking
“The pandemic has demonstrated that keeping track of how many people are dying and why they are dying is critical for governments to develop better-informed policies and improve health outcomes,” Ellis said.
So far, only 36 countries have released cause-of-death data for 2020. The researchers searched government websites, mortality databases, and the European Statistical Office for weekly or monthly data on deaths from all causes in the previous two years and up to 11 prior years for 74 countries and 266 states and provinces.
