The pandemic may have cost significantly more lives worldwide than previously thought. According to a recent study in The Lancet, between January 2020 and December 2021, 18.2 million more people died than would have been expected in years without a pandemic. Only 5.9 million corona deaths were officially recorded during this period.
“Our results suggest that the full impact of the pandemic was much greater than official statistics suggest,” write the international research team led by Haidong Wang from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle in the article.
According to the models, 120 out of 100,000 people worldwide died as a result of Corona, in 21 countries this excess mortality rate was over 300. The scientists found the highest rates in the Andean countries in Latin America (512 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants), in East (345) – and Central Europe (316) and Sub-Saharan Africa (309). In some countries such as Iceland or Australia, however, according to estimates, even fewer people died in the pandemic years than would have been statistically expected.
The sometimes large differences between the registered and the actual number of deaths are probably due to a lack of diagnoses due to a lack of tests and problems with reporting the numbers. It is currently unclear how many people died directly from the disease caused by the virus and how many died from indirect consequences of the pandemic. “Studies from several countries, including Sweden and the Netherlands, suggest that Covid-19 was the direct cause of most excess deaths, but we don’t have enough evidence for most regions at this time,” says study leader Wang.
The scientists had compiled weekly or monthly information on the number of deaths from a total of 74 countries and 266 states or provinces – such as the German federal states – from the pandemic years 2020 and 2021 and from up to eleven years before. The difference between the number of actual and statistically expected deaths gives the excess mortality. Using statistical models, they also estimated excess mortality for countries where no information on the number of deaths was available.