According to the Covid study, there are 18 million deaths worldwide

Key Takeaways:

• Up to 18.2 million people died from Covid in the first two years of the pandemic, according to the first peer-reviewed global estimate of excess deaths.
• To avoid undercounting and assessing the pandemic's devastation, the study focused on excess deaths, which was published in the Lancet medical journal.

A study found stark differences throughout countries and regions; the pandemic's death toll could be 3 times greater than official Covid-19 records suggest.

According to the first peer-reviewed global estimate of excess deaths, up to 18.2 million people died from Covid in the first 2 years of the pandemic. They attributed the discrepancy with official estimates of approximately 5.9 million deaths to a lack of testing and unreliable mortality data.

"At the global level, this is a quite the greatest mortality shock since the Spanish flu," stated Christopher J.L. Murray, director of the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, who conducted the study. Covid claimed that he was responsible for a 17 percent increase in global deaths in an interview. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed roughly 50 million people.

The study, published in the Lancet medical journal, focused on excess deaths to avoid undercounting and assessing the pandemic's devastation. While deaths continued to mount, the researchers compared January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2021, to data from previous years.

According to the researchers, the evidence suggests that Covid-19 is directly responsible for the increase in mortality. However, some deaths may have occurred indirectly as a result of a lack of access to health care as well as other essential services during the pandemic or from behavioral shifts that led to suicide or drug abuse, according to the researchers.

In a statement, Haidong Wang, an associate professor of metric health sciences at the Seattle-based institute, said, "Studies from several nations, such as Sweden and the Netherlands, imply Covid-19 was the direct cause of most excess deaths." "Knowing the true pandemic death toll is critical for effective public health decision-making."

Improving data on deaths can offer governments a clearer picture of how to best direct efforts to protect their citizens, according to Jennifer Ellis, who leads Bloomberg Philanthropies' Data for Health program, which works with low- and middle-income countries to improve data collection. Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News' parent company Bloomberg LP, established Bloomberg Philanthropies as a charitable organization.

Death Surveillance

"The pandemic has shown how important it is for governments to keep track of how many individuals are dying and why they are dying to formulate better-informed policies and improve health outcomes," Ellis said.

So far, only 36 countries have made cause-of-death data available for 2020. The researchers searched government websites, mortality databases, and the European Statistical Office for weekly as well as monthly data on deaths from all causes in the last two years and up to 11 years prior for 74 countries and 266 states and provinces.

Excess deaths were predicted using a statistical model for countries that did not report weekly or monthly data. The researchers discovered that excess deaths were 9.5 times higher in South Asia and 14.2 times higher in Sub-Saharan Africa than previously reported.