London, Europe Brief News – Researchers suggest that more than 18 million people, which is three-time higher than the official figure suggested Covid-19 Death Tolls, have probably died due to the Covid-19 Virus.
The Covid-19 excess mortality team at the US’s Washington University studies almost 191 countries and territories for what they call the true global death figure.
Some of the deaths happen mainly because of the virus but others were somehow linked with infection. This is possible because getting infected by Covid-19 may have worsened other pre-existing diseases such as heart or lung disease.
Excess Death Measure
The research used a measure known as excess death. In the excess death, researchers find out how many people have been dying than would be expected compared to recent years before the pandemic hit.
Rates of excess deaths have varied dramatically by country and region but the overall global rate calculated in the study is 120 deaths per 100,000 people.
This only means that about 18.2 million deaths have happened because of Covid-19 in two years between the start of 2020 and at the end of 2021. The figure for death is three times bigger than the official 5.9 million that have been officially recorded by top organisations.
The researchers also mentioned that the excess death estimates were calculated for the full study period rather than for week, month or year. This approach was mainly used because of lags and inconsistencies in reporting Covid-19 deaths.
According to the research published in the Lancet, the higher rates were in lower-income countries like Latina America, Europe and sub-Saharan Africa whereas the Covid-19 Death Tolls were supposedly high in some high-income countries like Italy and parts of the US.
The five countries with the highest estimated excess death rates were Bulgaria, Bolivia, Eswatini, Lesotho and North Macedonia.
The five countries with the lowest estimated excess death rates were Australia, Newzealand, Singapore, Iceland and Taiwan.
Dr Haidong Wang, Lead author from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said “ Understanding the true death toll from the pandemic is vital for effective public health decision-making”.
He further added, “ Studies from several countries including Sweden and Netherlands suggest Covid was the direct cause of most excess deaths but we currently do not have enough pieces of evidence for most locations”.
