The first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic have cost almost 337 million years of life and caused the premature death of millions of people, the WHO reveals this Friday, May 19, 2023.
The World Health Organization is thus pointing out the devastating effects of the health crisis caused by Covid-19.
Between 2020 and 2021, 336.8 million years of life were lost
In 2020 and 2021 alone, Covid resulted in the loss of 336.8 million years of life worldwide, according to the organization.
“It’s like losing 22 years of life for every additional death,” Samira Asma, deputy chief of WHO’s data and analysis department, told reporters before the release.
And this calculation is based on data available in 2022.
Since then, the death toll has continued to rise, albeit at a slower pace, prompting the WHO to raise its highest health alert level, not without warning that the Covid virus is not yet gone.
The official WHO death toll from the disease, regularly updated, is 6.9 million as of May 17.
But many countries have failed to provide reliable data to the WHO, which estimates that in three years the pandemic has claimed almost three times that number, at least 20 million dead.
It relies on the calculation of excess mortality, defined as the difference between the actual number of deaths and the estimated number of deaths without a pandemic.
That 20 million includes direct deaths from Covid, but also deaths related to the impact of the pandemic on healthcare systems.
Friday’s report stressed that “significant inequalities underlie the distribution of Covid-19 cases and deaths, and access to vaccination”.
The WHO has warned that the pandemic has helped derail many health-related indicators that have been improving for years.
According to the report, in the first two decades of the century there were significant improvements in maternal and child health worldwide, with mortality falling by a third in each case.
The incidence of infectious diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis and malaria has also decreased significantly, as has the risk of premature death from non-communicable diseases.
Together, these factors helped increase global life expectancy from 67 years in 2000 to 73 years in 2019.
But after the outbreak of the pandemic, existing inequalities worsened, reversing the positive trend in malaria and tuberculosis, among others, the WHO notes.