Coronavirus pandemic far deadlier than official count, WHO estimate suggests

[CRG]

Article: Financial Times
Coronavirus pandemic far deadlier than official count, WHO estimate suggests.

"The number of people who died as a result of the coronavirus pandemic by the end of last year may be nearly three times higher than previously thought, according to estimates by the World Health Organization. The WHO calculation is based on an analysis of excess mortality, an approach used by demographers to measure the real impact of the health crisis that compares average death rates with those recorded during the pandemic. By the close of 2021, there were 14.9mn excess deaths “associated directly or indirectly” with the pandemic recorded globally, according to the health body. There were 5.4mn officially confirmed Covid-19 deaths in 2020 and 2021, according to research project Our World in Data."

More at link: https://www.ft.com/content/fb593801-eec5-4496-a647-e00ccbc3e336

 

[Barry]

Does not surprise me at all.

 

[CRG]

Adding this here because both topical and pertinent:

Life expectancy in China is now the same as in the US

The US has had a hard pandemic. The country has the highest reported death toll of any country in the world, crossing the one million mark on 4 May. That’s equivalent to wiping out the population of the state of Rhode Island. A reluctance to socially distance in many states, slow vaccine uptake (about 15 per cent of adults remained unvaccinated as recently as December 2021) and a high obesity rate have contributed to the country’s death toll. So profound has the impact been that it led US life expectancy to fall by between one and a half and two years between 2019 and 2020, according to several studies.

Life expectancy has declined in other countries as well, but nowhere so severely as the US. A study published in the BMJ estimated that US life expectancy fell by 1.87 years, compared with 0.22 years in peer countries including the UK, France and South Korea.

The fall is big enough that the US now has the same life expectancy as that of China: about 77 years. Indeed, it is likely that China’s life expectancy now exceeds that of the US. This is because US life expectancy is expected to have fallen yet further in 2021 to 76.6 years, according to a provisional analysis of health data published last month.

Chart: https://www.newstatesman.com/chart-of-the-day/2022/05/us-now-has-the-same-life-expectancy-as-china

 

[Peter T]

Here in the UK the official Covid death toll was significantly lower than the excess deaths figures, but I have not seen recent figures to know if the discrepancy between the two continues at the rate it was a year ago, when the discrepancy in total deaths was in the region of 20,000 or 30,000.

The Channel 4 evening news today suggested the official death toll of 400,000 in India may be a significant underestimate the actual figure being in the region of four million.

So I am not surprised by the WHO figures.

 

[Hutan]

from the NZ Doctor
"In this article from the Public Health Expert blog, we review the impact of Aotearoa NZ’s Covid-19 response strategies on mortality patterns during the first 2 years of the pandemic. We find that NZ experienced an increase in life expectancy, decreased winter mortality, and net decline in (excess) mortality. These impacts are far more positive than experienced by all other high-income countries during this pandemic period. This picture supports the cautious elimination and suppression strategies used for the first 2 years of the pandemic and there has also been time to prepare the country for the current Omicron wave."
Of course NZ had the advantage of time and isolation, and the impact of the pandemic is ongoing.