death toll COVID-19 According to an analysis published in the Lancet, the worldwide official toll could be more than three times.
While the official COVID-19 death toll was 5.9 million between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2021, the new study estimates an additional 18.2 million deaths over the same period, suggesting that the full impact of the pandemic could be far greater. Is.
South Asia had the highest number of estimated additional deaths from COVID-19, with 5.3 million additional deaths, followed by North Africa and the Middle East (1.7 million) and Eastern Europe (1.4 million). At the country level, an estimated more deaths occurred in India (4.1 million), the United States (1.1 million), Russia (1.1 million), Mexico (798,000), Brazil (792,000), Indonesia (736,000), and Pakistan. (664,000). These seven countries may have accounted for more than half of the global excess deaths caused by the pandemic in a 24-month period, the study authors said.
Excess deaths – the difference between the number of deaths recorded from all causes and the expected number based on past trends – is a key measure of the actual death toll of an epidemic.
Among these countries, the overdose death rates were highest in Russia (375 deaths per 100,000) and Mexico (325 deaths per 100,000), and in Brazil (187 deaths per 100,000) and the United States (179 deaths per 100,000). was similar. Due to its large population, India alone accounts for an estimated 22% of the global total deaths. According to the study, India has reported 4.89 lakh deaths, with the COVID fatality rate of 18.3 per lakh. According to the study, the total excess mortality rate is estimated at 40.70 lakh deaths with an excess mortality rate of Rs 152.5/-per lakh. While there have been many attempts to estimate the mortality rate over COVID-19, most are limited in geographic scope due to the availability of data. The new study provides the first peer-reviewed estimates of excess deaths due to the pandemic globally and for 191 countries and territories as well as 252 sub-national locations such as states and provinces.
The analysis indicates that the global additional deaths due to the pandemic could total 18.2 million by December 31, 2021 – more than three times the figure from the official report. The excess mortality rate is estimated at 120 deaths per 100,000 population globally, and rates of over 300 deaths per 100,000 population were estimated in 21 countries.
The highest estimated excess mortality rates are Andean Latin America (512 deaths per 100,000 population), Eastern Europe (345 deaths per 100,000), Central Europe (316 deaths per 100,000), Southern Sub-Saharan Africa (309 deaths per 100,000) and Central Latin America (274 deaths per 100,000). Conversely, some countries were estimated to have had fewer deaths than expected based on mortality rates in previous years, including Iceland (48 fewer deaths per 100,000), Australia (38 fewer deaths per 100,000), and Singapore (38 fewer deaths per 100,000). 16 fewer deaths per 100,000). ,
The proportion of more deaths than reported deaths is far higher in South Asia (9.5 times more deaths than reported deaths) and Sub-Saharan Africa (14.2 times higher than reported deaths) than in other regions .
The large gap between more deaths and official records may be the result of underdiagnosis due to a lack of testing and issues with reporting death statistics. Early studies show that so far only 36 countries have released data on cause of death for 2020. As data for more countries becomes available, it will be possible to better determine whether the higher number of deaths were directly due to COVID-19.
Lead author of the study, Dr Haidong Wang from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, USA, said: “Understanding the actual death toll from the pandemic is critical to making effective public health decisions. Studies from several countries suggest that COVID-19 was the direct cause of most deaths, but we currently do not have enough evidence for most locations. ,