Patient with Covid-19 at Ichilov Hospital, Tel Aviv, Israel February 21, 2022. AMIR COHEN/REUTERS
In November 2021, the British weekly The Economist estimated the global death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic at 17 million instead of the officially recorded 5 million. The newspaper calculated excess deaths from all causes combined in different countries. However, this was the work of “quality investigative journalism, not peer-reviewed scientific research,” says Prof. Antoine Flahaud, director of the Institute for Global Health (University of Geneva).
This time it’s a reference group from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington (Seattle, USA) that released their measuring instruments. This assessment, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was led by renowned epidemiologist Christopher Murray, who developed a method to measure the “global burden of disease” by country. This new work, verified by independent experts, was published March 10 in The Lancet.
The researchers compared country-by-country deaths reported between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021 with those expected based on past trends (up to eleven years prior to the start of the pandemic). Excess mortality is the difference between the two: a fairly accurate measure of the weight of a pandemic. “Excess death rates are probably the best measure of the effectiveness of pandemic management in different countries,” says Antoine Flahaud.
Indirect effects
To make this comparison, the US team consulted government websites, the World Health Organization (WHO) mortality database, the Human Mortality Database, and the US and European Union Statistics Office (Eurostat). “Of the 195 countries recognized by the UN, 74 countries have reliable mortality data,” says Antoine Flao. The researchers also subtracted from their calculations the number of heat-related deaths in Europe in the summer of 2020.
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But for many countries that don’t have civil registries, matching births and deaths? The authors used modeling based on fragmentary data at their disposal, for example, studies conducted on population samples.
Result: While the official balance of the pandemic reports 5.9 million deaths in the first two years of the pandemic, the authors estimate that 18.2 million excess deaths actually occurred during this period. After all, a terrible burden, similar to The Economist’s estimates.
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