three years after the first death, what is the global assessment of the pandemic?

On January 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) recorded, in Wuhan, the first official death linked to a new epidemic which will be baptized a month later “Covid-19”. Three years later, the daily count of the number of deaths is no longer counted every day, but the human toll remains at the heart of the news in China, where the government abruptly lifted, in early December 2022, most of its measures. sanitation against the coronavirus. Although the official toll of the pandemic there is only 5,354 deaths, the WHO is calling for the communication of more reliable statistics.

Globally, the death toll from the pandemic stands at around 6.7 million worldwide, according to data from Our World in Data, a publication run by the University of Oxford, based on the number deaths reported by country.

The heaviest toll, recorded in the United States, would amount to more than a million deaths. According to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the Covid-19 pandemic has led to the death of just over two million people on the European continent, including around 160,000 in France.

Consideration of other pandemic-related deaths

However, these figures should be taken with caution. As the WHO points out, it is very difficult to estimate the real number of deaths from Covid-19. According to the international institution, basing estimates of the number of deaths from a pandemic on the number of deaths declared by country is not the best method to develop a complete panorama of the health impact of Covid-19. Indeed, the number of reported deaths does not take into account people who died without having been tested.

This count, explains the WHO, remains “subject to the country’s recognition of Covid as the cause of death”. Finally, it “does not take into account the increase in other deaths linked to the pandemic”, in other words patients who have given up or have not been able to access care, because of the saturation of the health system.

Assess excess mortality

The WHO thus underlines that it is more relevant to calculate the excess mortality due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which corresponds to the difference between the number of deaths during a crisis and the number of deaths under normal conditions. This method of calculation had, for example, been used as early as 1918 to count the number of deaths from the Spanish flu.

Taking these parameters into account and estimating the excess mortality linked to the pandemic, a study conducted by the WHO and published in the journal Nature in December 2022, for the years 2020 and 2021, thus reported 14.83 million deaths in the world. This assessment, which concerns only two out of the three years that have elapsed since the first death, is thus two to three higher than the number of officially declared Covid-19 deaths.

This method should also be taken with caution, as the study authors point out. In fact, the monthly data making it possible to assess excess mortality are only available in around a hundred countries, ie half of the total number of countries.

There are also several ways to calculate excess mortality from these data. The WHO thus considers that the difficulties in establishing the balance sheet of the Covid pandemic underline “the urgent need to set up robust and centralized systems allowing real-time monitoring of global mortality”.

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