Nearly 15 million deaths associated with Covid-19

LONDON (AP) — The World Health Organization 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 U.N. agency's chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described the figure 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 attributed to the pandemic's impact on health systems, like people with cancer unable to seek treatment when hospitals were full of Covid 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 and 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 Dr. 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 after it suffered a severe outbreak of MERS allowed it to escape Covid-19 with a percapita death rate around a 20th of that of the U.S.

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. 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 that missed deaths in India ranged between 3.3 million to 6.5 million.

In a statement following the release of WHO's data, India disputed the methodology used by the U.N. health agency. India's Health and Family Welfare Ministry called WHO's analysis and data collection methods "questionable" and complained that the new death estimates were released "without adequately addressing India's concerns."

Samira Asma, a senior WHO director, acknowledged that "numbers are sometimes controversial" and that all estimates are only an approximation of the virus' catastrophic effects.