A new WHO estimate points out that Covid-19 was associated with 14.8 million deaths across the planet in 2020 and 2021. The number is 2.7 times greater than the 5.4 million deaths officially recorded during these two years old.
Published in an article this Wednesday (15) in the journal Nature, the calculation adds to other research that already pointed to a huge number of deaths related to Covid-19, but which were not computed in this way. A survey published in March of this year in the journal Lancet pointed to around 18 million deaths from Covid-19 in the first two years of the pandemic.
The survey carried out by the WHO uses the concept of excess deaths to calculate the new estimate. To arrive at the new number of deaths, one possibility is to calculate the number of deaths expected for a certain period of time and compare it with the number observed when there was a public health emergency, such as the Covid-19 pandemic.
In addition, excess deaths consider those directly caused by the viral infection or those that are not – an example is the burden on the health system that prevents the treatment and diagnosis of other diseases.
The non-reporting of deaths caused by Covid during the pandemic occurs for several reasons. One of them, for example, involves testing. For some countries, access to diagnoses is more difficult, which may cause an error in the notification of a death.
Although this assumption of deaths associated with Covid is of a global nature, the WHO draws attention in the article to the fact that, for some nations, estimating this number is more uncertain. This is because many countries, even before the pandemic, did not have a robust death notification system. In this way, these regions make it difficult to calculate the number of deaths that normally occur in order to calculate the excess deaths observed in the pandemic.
In total, 100 countries had this information accounted for and broken down by months during the first two years of the health emergency. For the others, the WHO used an estimate to observe the number of unreported deaths that were directly or indirectly associated with Covid-19.
In addition to observing the total of 14.8 million deaths associated with Covid-19, the survey indicated the value divided for each of the years. In 2020, almost 4 and a half million deaths were estimated, while 2021 was more than double, according to the estimate.
The numbers also help to observe how many more deaths the pandemic caused and which would not exist if the public health emergency had never occurred. Over the two years, Covid-19 caused an increase of 13.1% more deaths compared to a scenario in which the virus had never infected a human being.
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