Most of the deaths occurred in Southeast Asia, Europe and
the Americas, according to a WHO report issued Thursday.
The U.N. health agency’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom
Ghebreyesus, described the newly calculated figure as “sobering,” saying it
should prompt countries to invest more in their capacities to quell future
health emergencies.
WHO tasked scientists with determining the actual number of
COVID-19 deaths between January 2020 and the end of last year. They estimated
that between 13.3 million and 16.6 million people died either due to the
coronavirus directly or because of factors somehow attributed to the pandemic’s
impact on health systems, such as cancer patients who were unable to seek
treatment when hospitals were full of COVID patients.
Based on that range, the scientists came up with an
approximated total of 14.9 million.
The estimate was based on country-reported data and
statistical modeling, but only about half of countries provided information.
WHO said it wasn’t yet able to break down the data to distinguish between
direct deaths from COVID-19 and those related to effects of the pandemic, but
the agency plans a future project examining death certificates.
“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 per-capita death rate around a 20th of the one in the
United States.
Accurately counting COVID-19 deaths has been problematic
throughout the pandemic, as reports of confirmed cases represent only a
fraction of the devastation wrought by the virus, largely because of limited
testing. Government figures reported to WHO and a separate tally kept by Johns
Hopkins University show more than 6.2 million reported virus deaths to date.
Scientists at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation
at the University of Washington calculated for a recent study published in the
journal Lancet that there were more than 18 million COVID deaths from January
2020 to December 2021.
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 alone ranged between 3.3 million to 6.5
million.
In a statement following the release of WHO’s data, India
disputed the U.N. agency’s methodology. India’s Health and Family Welfare
Ministry called the 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.
“It has become very obvious during the entire course of the
pandemic, there have been data that is missing,” Asma told reporters during a
press briefing on Thursday. “Basically, all of us were caught unprepared.”
Ko said the new 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 fragile health systems and
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 asked, citing
the far higher mortality rates in the U.S. and Europe.
Dr. Bharat Pankhania, a public health specialist at
Britain’s University of Exeter, said the world may never get close to measuring
the true toll of COVID-19, particularly in poor countries.
“When you have a massive outbreak where people are dying in
the streets because of a lack of oxygen, bodies were abandoned or people had to
be cremated quickly because of cultural beliefs, we end up never knowing just
how many people died,” he explained.
Pankhania said that while the estimated COVID-19 death toll
still pales in comparison to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which experts
estimate caused up to 100 million deaths, the fact that so many people died
despite the advances of modern medicine, including vaccines, is shameful.
He also warned that the cost of COVID-19 could be far more
damaging in the long term, given the increasing burden of caring for people
with long COVID.
“With the Spanish flu, there was the flu and then there were
some (lung) illnesses people suffered, but that was it,” he said. “There was
not an enduring immunological condition that we’re seeing right now with
COVID.”
“We do not know the extent to which people with long COVID
will have their lives cut short and if they will have repeated infections that
will cause them even more problems,” Pankhania said. -AP
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