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According to researchers, the global death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic could be about three times higher than official figures.
In a study published Thursday in The Lancet, a group of authors wrote that the estimated number of excess deaths has reached more than 18 million, more than three times the 5.94 million deaths the study says over the same period.
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They arrived at these conclusions using six models used to estimate expected mortality and report all-cause mortality for 74 countries and territories and 266 subnational localities.
“Because worldwide mortality records are incomplete, we built a statistical model that predicted excess mortality for places and periods when all-cause mortality data were not available,” the authors explained.
Excess mortality was estimated by comparing the total number of deaths recorded for all causes with how many deaths could be expected based on recent trends, excluding data for periods affected by late registration and anomalies.
“The highest rates of excess deaths from COVID-19 have been in the Andes of Latin America, Eastern Europe and Central Europe, with high rates of death in many high-income countries in the northern hemisphere and similarly high rates in almost all of Latin America. Relatively low rates of excess mortality were observed in East Asia, Australia and the high-income Asia-Pacific region. The surge in April-August 2021 in South Asia brought the region’s cumulative excess deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic to or exceeded levels seen in some high-income countries. income countries,” the researchers say. “The cumulative global excess mortality from the pandemic makes COVID-19 potentially one of the leading global causes of death during the pandemic, given the rates and trends of other pre-pandemic causes of death.”
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Limitations of the study include that different modeling strategies were used, that the most recent weeks and months in 2021 were excluded from the estimate, that they estimated the cumulative excess mortality rate from COVID-19, that the empirical evidence that much of the excess mortality data derived from COVID-19 is not present in most countries, that the inclusion of other variables could improve model predictions, that strict restrictions and mediating interventions may lead to negative excess mortality during a pandemic, that various factors are responsible for changes in all-cause and cause-specific mortality among of the population that excess mortality estimates cannot be disaggregated by age or sex, and finally, trends in excess mortality due to COVID-19 are expected to change over time as population coverage increases and new options become available.
The authors write that understanding the pandemic’s true impact on mortality is critical to public health decision making and future research, and increasing the availability of cause-of-death data “will be critical to determining the proportion of excess mortality that was directly caused by SARS.” CoV-2 infection.”
According to Nature, the results are the first estimate of global excess mortality published in a peer-reviewed journal, and the World Health Organization’s (WHO) own analysis is due to be published later in March.
Study co-author Haidong Wang, a demographer and population health expert at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, told the journal that more work needs to be done to separate deaths caused by COVID-19 from those that are most common. indirect effects of the pandemic.
While some disputed the results of the study, Wang stressed that different models and methods produce different results.
For example, while this model uses 15 variables to estimate excess mortality in a country, The Economist’s model, which also reports “very similar” global estimates of excess mortality, has a model that uses over 100 variables.
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The authors drew attention to what they say are “drastic differences in estimated rates of excess mortality between the two studies for many countries.
Since 2020, there have been 6,038,343 COVID-19 deaths globally and 967,165 in the US, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.