I’ve been waiting for this study. It’s obvious that many countries have not been able to accurately record the death toll from COVID-19, and there are some who have kept the official counts low for their own purposes. This is how scientists usually assess the death toll:
Last week, a consortium of health researchers published a harrowing report that reframed the magnitude of loss during the COVID-19 pandemic: an estimated 18.2 million people have lost their lives during the pandemic, they estimate, which is three times the official global death toll of 5.9 million COVID-19 deaths.
Researchers landed on the higher number, which was published in an analysis in The Lancet, based on their calculation of the number of “excess deaths.” The term excess deaths refers to deaths that were above what would be expected on average over a given time, meaning that they were either caused directly or indirectly by the pandemic. The researchers looked at the difference between the number of deaths recorded from January 1, 2020, until December 31, 2021, and the number of expected deaths based on previous trends.
This report is the first estimate of global excess deaths to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.
“Our estimates of COVID-19 excess mortality suggest the mortality impact from the COVID-19 pandemic has been more devastating than the situation documented by official statistics,” the authors wrote. “Official statistics on reported COVID-19 deaths provide only a partial picture of the true burden of mortality.”
Nearly one million of those deaths are from right here in the good old USA. And we aren’t done yet.