According to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO), the most complete on the true number of fatalities of the pandemic To date, the death toll from Covid-19 It is almost three times higher than that shown by official data.
According to the UN body, by the end of 2021 there had been 14.9 million deaths associated with Covid-19. The official count of deaths directly attributable to Covid-19 and reported to the WHO in that period, from January 2020 to the end of December 2021, is just over 5.4 million.
The WHO excess mortality figures reflect people who died from Covid-19, as well as those who perished as an indirect result of the outbreak, including those unable to access health care. healthcare by other conditions when systems were overwhelmed during huge waves of infection.
It also takes into account deaths averted during the pandemic, for example due to the lower risk of traffic accidents during lockdowns.
However, the figures are also much higher than the official count due to missed deaths in countries that did not adequately report. Even before the pandemic, around six in 10 deaths worldwide went unrecorded, the WHO noted.
The report notes that almost half of the hitherto unaccounted-for deaths occurred in India. The study suggests that 4.7 million people died there as a result of the pandemicespecially in May and June 2021.
Other models have also come to similar conclusions that the global death toll is far higher than recorded statistics. For comparison, some 50 million people are believed to have died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 and 36 million because of the HIV since the epidemic began in the 1980s.
Samira AsthmaWHO’s assistant director-general for data and analytics, who co-led the calculation process, said data is the “lifeblood of public health” needed to assess and learn from what has happened during the pandemic, calling for more support so that countries improve reporting.
“Too many things are unknown,” he told reporters at a news conference.