Three times as many deaths due to COVID-19 than reported: WHO

LONDON: The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that nearly 15 million people were killed either by coronavirus or by its impact on overwhelmed health systems in the past two years, more than double the official death toll of 6 million.

Most of the fatalities were in Southeast Asia, Europe and the Americas.

In a report Thursday, the UN agency’s chief Tedrosadhanomghebreyesusdescribedthefigure as “sobering,” saying it should prompt countries to invest more in their capacities to quell future health emergencies.

Scientists tasked by WHO with calculating the actual number of COVID-19 deaths between January 2020 and the end of last year estimated there were between 13.3 million and 16.6 million deaths that were either caused directly by the coronavirus or were somehow atributed to the pandemic’s impact on health systems, like people with cancer unable to seek treatment when hospitals were full of COVID-19 patients.

The figures are based on country-reported data and statistical modelling but only about half of countries provided information.

WHO said it wasn’t yet able to break down the figures to distinguish between direct deaths from COVID-19 and others caused by the pandemic, but said a future project examining death certificates would probe this. “This may seem like just a bean-counting exercise, but having these WHO numbers is so critical to understanding how we should combat future pandemics and continue to respond to this one,” said Albert Ko, an infectious diseases specialist at the Yale School of Public Health WHO was not linked to the WHO research.

For example, Ko said, South Korea’s decision to invest heavily in public health ater it suffered a severe outbreak of MERS allowed it to escape COVID-19 with a per-capita death rate around a 20th of that of the US.

Accurate numbers on COVID-19 deaths have been problematic throughout the pandemic, as the figures are only a fraction of the devastation wrought by the virus, largely because of limited testing and differences in how countries count COVID-19 deaths.

According to government figures reported to WHO and to a separate count kept by Johns Hopkins University, there have been more than 6 million reported coronavirus deaths to date.

Scientists at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington guessed there were more than 18 million COVID deaths from January 2020 to December 2021 in a recent study published in the journal Lancet, and a team led by Canadian researchers estimated there were more than 3 million uncounted coronavirus deaths in India alone.

WHO’S new analysis estimated there were more than 4 million missed deaths in India, ranging between 3.3 million to 6.5 million.

Some countries, including India, have disputed WHO’S methodology for calculating COVID-19 deaths, resisting the idea that there were many more deaths than officially counted.

India has been consistently objecting to the methodology adopted by the WHO to project excess mortality estimates based on mathematical models, the Union Health Ministry said on Thursday.

Contending that the country has an “extremely robust” system of births and deaths registration, the Union health ministry, in its rebutal, called the WHO’S system of data collection “statistically unsound and scientifically questionable”, according to NDTV.

“Despite India’s objection to the process, methodology, and outcome of this modelling exercise, the WHO has released the excess mortality estimates without adequately addressing India’s concerns. India had also informed the WHO that in view of the availability of authentic data published through Civil Registration System (CRS) by Registrar General of India (RGI), mathematical models should not be used for projecting excess mortality numbers for India,” it said.

Based on reports submited by states and UTS, Vital Statistics of India, based on the CRS, are published annually by the RGI and the last such national report for the year 2019 was published in June 2021 and for 2020, on May 3, 2022, a Ministry statement said, adding that India “firmly believes that such robust and accurate data generated through legal framework of a member state must be respected, accepted and used by WHO rather than relying on less than accurate mathematical projection based on non-official sources of data”.

Earlier this week, the Indian government released new figures showing there were 474,806 more deaths in 2020 compared to the previous year, but did not say how many were tied to the pandemic. India did not release any death estimates for 2021, when the highly infectious delta variant swept through the country, killing many thousands.

Ko said beter figures from WHO might also explain some lingering mysteries about the pandemic, like why Africa appears to have been one of the least affected by the virus, despite its low vaccination rates.

“Were the mortality rates so low because we couldn’t count the deaths or was there some other factor to explain that?” he said, adding that the crush of deaths in rich countries like Britain and the US proved that resources alone were insufficient to contain a global outbreak.