More than 18 million people worldwide have likely died from causes related to COVID-19
“We can confidently say that the pandemic has killed an extra 18.2 million people,” says Dr. Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics at the University of Washington and a co-author of the paper.,” or the additional number of people who have died in a given period—in this case, Jan. 1, 2020 to Dec. 31, 2021—compared to the number that would be expected to die in the same span of time in the past.
Geography made a huge difference in which populations were at greatest risk of dying from COVID-19. A handful of places—including Iceland, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, and Taiwan—actually experienced a reduction in overall deaths in the studied two-year period compared to similar periods in the past. This was likely due to effective lockdown protocols that led to lower rates of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases like influenza, the researchers say.
Part of the reason those countries rank first is simply because of their high populations. A more accurate measure of the toll of the pandemic country by country is numbers of excess deaths per 100,000 people. Measured that way, the five hardest hit countries or regions were Bolivia, at 735 excess deaths per 100,000 people; Bulgaria, at 647; Eswatini, in southern Africa, at 635; North Macedonia, with 584; and Lesotho, at 563.
“We know that diabetes and obesity are the biggest risk factors, other than age, for dying from COVID,” says Murray. “So we’re pretty suspicious that those are just miscoded COVID deaths.”
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