The Covid-19 death toll is even worse than it looks

The recorded death count from the COVID-19 pandemic as of Friday is nearing 2 million. The true extent is far worse.

A body about to be loaded into a refrigerated truck at the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner in Tucson, Arizona, on Thursday. Picture: AFP

The recorded death count from the COVID-19 pandemic as of Friday is nearing 2 million. The true extent is far worse.

More than 2.8 million people have lost their lives due to the pandemic, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 59 countries. Deaths in these places last year surged more than 12 per cent above average levels.

Less than two-thirds of that surge has been attributed directly to COVID-19. Experts believe that many, if not most, of the additional deaths were directly linked to the disease, particularly early in the pandemic when testing was sparse. Some of those excess deaths came from indirect fallout, from healthcare disruptions, people avoiding the hospital and other issues.

To better understand the pandemic’s global toll, the Journal compiled the most recent available data on deaths from all causes from countries that together account for a quarter of the world’s population but about three-quarters of all reported deaths from COVID-19. The tally found more than 821,000 additional deaths that aren’t accounted for in official COVID-19 counts.

These countries would likely have counted about 15 million deaths through lhe previous quarter without the pandemic, based on prior-year trends. Instead, they reported nearly 17 million deaths.

Some countries, including New Zealand and Norway, are showing lower-than-expected deaths. This may be the effect of controlling the virus through behaviour changes that tamp down other causes of death, such as increased hygiene and reduced social interactions that spread other diseases.

Because statistics can miss connections between deaths and major events, epidemiologists often measure excess deaths — or death tolls above expected levels — to try to capture the fuller picture.

The Journal used the same simple method to calculate expected deaths by averaging death tolls for each country in recent years, then measuring the differences. Tallies for some countries may differ from those nations’ own calculations.

Studying excess deaths helped researchers link nearly 3000 fatalities to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017, compared with the island government’s original count of 64. Examining excess deaths helps incorporate those who perished over a longer period of time due to issues such as healthcare disruptions and power outages.

The UN had projected that absent the pandemic, there would have been roughly 59.2 million deaths last year. It’s too early to say by how much the planet exceeded that. The pandemic may have accelerated the deaths of some people who still would have died in 2020. Still, researchers who examined the impact early in the pandemic found the oldest victims were losing almost a year of life on average.

In the US alone, Centres for Disease Control and Prevention data show more than 475,000 excess deaths through to early December, a time frame that also included about 281,000 deaths linked to COVID-19.

The pandemic led US deaths to climb at least 10 per cent last year. Typically US deaths grow about 1.6 per cent a year as the population grows and ages.

In Iran, which has been hit hard by the coronavirus, officials have said total fatalities could be triple the official COVID-19 death toll, which was recently about 56,000. In Afghanistan, locals believe the actual death toll is many times the official figure of 2300 COVID-19 deaths.

The Journal’s tally didn’t include many countries in Africa, where the pandemic death toll remains largely unknown. South Africa, which tracks deaths weekly, has reported more than 22,000 COVID-19 deaths but more than twice that number of excess deaths.

China, where the virus first emerged, and with a population of roughly 1.4 billion, has officially recorded fewer than 5000 COVID-19 deaths. The most populous country’s 2020 mortality report to be eleased on Monday will add a major piece to a still-incomplete global puzzle.

The Wall Street Journal