More than 6 million people have died from COVID-19 worldwide, according to official counts. But the more comprehensive toll, tallying deaths directly or indirectly attributable to COVID-19, may be three times higher, according to a new study published in the Lancet.
“We can confidently say that the pandemic has killed an extra 18.2 million people,” says Dr. Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics at the University of Washington and a co-author of the paper.
Those 18.2 million people represent what epidemiologists refer to as “excess deaths,” or the additional number of people who have died in a given period—in this case, Jan. 1, 2020 to Dec. 31, 2021—compared to the number that would be expected to die in the same span of time in the past. The new study relied on data from 74 countries that tracked excess deaths and used computer models to extrapolate those figures out to 191 countries worldwide.
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To understand approximately how many excess deaths COVID-19 caused, the researchers compared reported deaths in the 74 countries in 2020 and 2021 to 11 years of previous data. On average, 80% of the 18.2 million deaths beyond the expected amount were listed on death certificates as being caused by COVID-19. The other 20% were from multiple causes, such as chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease, but the researchers determined these to also be related to COVID-19. Blaming a heart attack, say, on COVID-19 may seem like a leap, but researchers determined that there was no other reason for cardiovascular and other deaths to have risen in 2020 and 2021 except for overburdened hospitals, fears of contracting the virus that prevented people from making regular visits to physicians to care for their chronic conditions, and other pandemic-related obstacles to health care. Excess deaths among seniors, a population especially vulnerable to the worst effects of the virus, were more likely to have…
Source : time
