The Covid-19 pandemic would have caused more than 18 million deaths worldwide between the beginning of 2020 and the end of 2021, more than three times the official toll, according to a study published in the journal The Lancet.
A balance sheet largely revised upwards. The official figure counts 5.94 million deaths worldwide between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2021. But the study published in the journal The Lancet re-evaluates this figure and estimates it at 18.2 million deaths linked to Covid-19 over this same period, i.e. more than three times the official balance sheet, based on calculations based on excess mortality.
The authors of the study have indeed worked on the difference between the number of people who died, whatever the cause of their death, and the number of expected deaths, based on past data. The difference between the excess mortality and the recorded Covid-19 deaths could lie in the under-diagnosis of coronavirus infections, and/or by deaths from other diseases higher than anticipated under the effect of changes in behaviors or less access to care, according to the researchers.
However, the authors acknowledge certain limitations to their study and consider further work necessary to measure the excess mortality directly due to Covid-19.
Among the most affected regions, the Andean countries of Latin America, eastern and central Europe, the south of sub-Saharan Africa.
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