The World Health Organization has the task of measuring the impact of Covid19 and to do so it analyzes excess mortality data from all over the world.
From the most recent calculations based on excess mortality estimates, the real number of deaths caused by Covid19 is 2.74 times higher than official estimates. Will we ever know the exact number of victims of Covid19?
Covid, the new WHO data: the virus has caused 14.83 million deaths
by Naomi Penna
Since its onset in December 2019, Sars-CoV2 has infected more than 650 million people, causing the deaths of 6.5 million. These data derive from the counts carried out in the individual states where for the past 3 years now the deaths caused by Covid19 have been counted.
The lethality of the Covid
The number of deaths on confirmed cases is indicated as lethality and is represented by the acronym CFR (Case Fatality Rate), this indicator suffers greatly from testing capacity. In fact, in the very early stages of the Covid19 pandemic, an apparent lethality of around 14% was recorded in Italy. It means that for 100 positive tests, 14 people would have died from the virus. This number has decreased enormously for two reasons: the expansion of testing and the spread of immunity. In fact, by increasing the number of tests, the number of positives increases by reducing the CFR ratio, furthermore the spread of vaccines has reduced the intrinsic lethality of Covid19 which today stands at around 0.2%.
Numbers that don’t tell everything
But is the count of positive deaths enough to know the impact of the epidemic? The number of deaths positive for a pathogen is an important parameter to measure the impact but it is not sufficient. In fact, epidemics are extremely complex phenomena that can have consequences that are not always foreseeable. For example, during the very first phase of the Covid19 pandemic, a significant reduction in excess mortality was observed, in practice fewer people died than expected despite the numerous deaths caused by Sars-CoV2. This is because the measures put in place to curb Covid19 have reduced the number of accidents and infections with other respiratory viruses such as influenza and RSV.
The excess mortality
However, the Covid19 pandemic has also caused many indirect deaths, in fact, due to the virus, many hospital operations have been postponed, screening campaigns canceled and in general the health systems have been subjected to too much pressure which has led them to perform worse. These considerations suggest that to evaluate the impact of an epidemic it is better to use the value of the excess mortality.
Covid, is it possible to reduce the number of deaths?
by Aureliano Stingi
The excess mortality is a statistic that indicates the increase in the number of deaths during a certain period of time compared to the mortality normally expected in the same season. So the excess mortality allows us to consider: direct deaths from Covid19, indirect deaths but also deaths avoided due to anti-Covid19 measures.
WHO researchers calculated the excess mortality on the various continents and compared it with the data on deaths caused by Covid19 for the same period of time. The result of this analysis shows that the real number of deaths from Covid19 is approximately 14.83 million and therefore 2.74 times greater than that calculated on deaths from Covid19.
The differences between countries
This discrepancy between deaths from Covid19 and excess mortality is not the same in all countries, in fact in India, for example, the real number of deaths is about 4.74 million against the 531,000 reported, while in Italy the real and estimated numbers are similar, in fact they are respectively 160,000 and 137,000. The discrepancy between calculated and real deaths can mainly be explained by a different testing capacity that prevented developing countries from correctly counting deaths from Covid19.
What have we learned from the Covid pandemic?
by Aureliano Stingi
The ‘case’ of Italy
Italy has always been considered anomalous due to its very high number of deaths from Covid19, but this recent WHO analysis indicates that perhaps the Italian numbers are more reliable and therefore truthful than those of other European and world countries.
REF:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05522-2
Aureliano Stingi, doctor in molecular biology works in the field of precision oncology. He collaborates with the World Health Organization in the battle against Covid19-themed fake news
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