Global Covid-19 death toll may be 18 million, three times official tally: study
- Researchers publish first peer-reviewed study of excess death estimates on a global scale
- Findings come two years since the World Health Organization first described Covid-19 as a pandemic
The pandemic’s death toll may be three times higher than official Covid-19 records suggest, according to a study that found stark differences across countries and regions.
“At the global level, this is quite the biggest mortality shock since the Spanish flu,” said Christopher J.L. Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, where the study was conducted. Covid-19 drove a 17 per cent jump in deaths worldwide, he said in an interview. The flu pandemic that began in 1918 killed at least 50 million people.
The findings, published in The Lancet medical journal, focused on excess deaths to avoid undercounting and assess the extent of the pandemic’s devastation. While deaths continued to accumulate, the scientists compared the mortality between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2021 to comparable data for the prior years.
The evidence suggests the mortality surge is a direct result of Covid-19, the researchers said. But some deaths may also have occurred indirectly, they said, caused by a lack of access to health care and other essential services during the pandemic, or from behavioural shifts that led to suicide or drug abuse.
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“Studies from several countries, including Sweden and the Netherlands, suggest Covid-19 was the direct cause of most excess deaths,” said Haidong Wang, an associate professor of health metric sciences at the Seattle-based institute, in a statement. “Understanding the true death toll from the pandemic is vital for effective public health decision-making.”