Three years after the emergence of the novel coronavirus, the mortality rate of COVID-19 cannot be estimated – WHO estimates the number of deaths at 6.5 million, but researchers say that more than 18 million people have died
How many are dead, almost three years after the new coronavirus pandemic began?
The data is sketchy, the counts diverge — but experts generally agree that SARS-CoV-2 killed far more people than the official numbers show.
Mortality undoubtedly underestimated
The data available to the World Health Organization (WHO) speak of 6.5 million deaths until today. But groups of researchers, including the WHO as well as the press, for example The Economist magazine, agree that the number of deaths is actually “between 18 and 20 million” and even these numbers are “probably underestimated”. , epidemiologist Antoine Flao will tell Agence France-Presse.
Their estimates are based on so-called “excess mortality”, defined as the difference between the observed number of deaths and the expected number of deaths if the pandemic had not occurred.
Excess mortality includes both deaths directly attributable to the disease caused by the virus and those caused by indirect causes.
India is the country that contributed the most to the excess mortality, reaching 4.74 million deaths, according to the specific calculation model, but the methodology of which is strongly disputed by New Delhi.
It is followed by Russia (1.03 million). But it is Latin America where the model shows the biggest difference between the expected number of deaths (based on the average of previous years) and the estimated actual number of deaths. In Peru, for example, excess mortality is twice that of normal periods.
Why is counting so difficult?
The death toll from COVID-19 remains a delicate matter; it has been underestimated in some countries, much lower than it was in others, especially early in the pandemic.
Fragmentary as non-existent data in some countries are also blamed. “For nearly half of the world’s countries, tracking excess mortality is not possible with the data we have available,” WHO researchers emphasized in their article in the journal Nature.
In Africa in particular, monthly data on causes of death can only be found for six of the 47 countries.
Attributing a death to COVID-19 is difficult. “When a death occurs inside a hospital in a developed country, where the diagnosis (of COVID) has already been made, it is possible to attribute it—or not—to the virus” but outside hospitals, for example in nursing homes, doctors “generally do not have enough information to reach a conclusion”, underlines Antoine Flao.
China may suffer and add a heavy price
According to the Seattle-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which released a mid-month estimate of mortality trends, the death toll from COVID-19 in China could reach about 300,000 on April 1 and surpass the million by 2023.
In this country a large number of people have never been immunized due to the zero COVID policy, a large part of the population has not been vaccinated or not fully vaccinated.
The experience of Hong Kong, where 10,000 people died in the first months of the Omicron wave, foreshadows a high death rate.
Last week, Chinese authorities clarified that only deaths directly attributable to respiratory failure due to COVID-19 are now being counted. This change in methodology means that their actual number will be underestimated.
The importance of reliable data
“We need reliable data” to “be able to stay ahead of the virus,” Ali Mokdad, a professor specializing in public health data collection and evaluation at (IHME), told AFP. Knowing the victim’s account allows for guidelines for public health policy-making.
“To get out of this crisis, the world must be able to monitor mortality and mortality with real-time, reliable and usable data,” experts from the World Health Organization also judge.
RES-EMP
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