The World Health Organization is estimating that nearly 15 million people were killed either by the coronavirus or by its impact on overwhelmed health systems in the first two years of the pandemic
FILE - Health workers and relatives carry the body of a COVID-19 victim for cremation in Jammu, India, Sunday, April 25, 2021. The World Health Organization is estimating that nearly 15 million people were killed either by the coronavirus or by its impact on overwhelmed health systems in the past two years. That is more than double its official death toll. The U.N. health agency says most of the fatalities were in Southeast Asia, Europe and the Americas.
WHO tasked scientists with determining the actual number of COVID-19 deaths between January 2020 and the end of last year. They estimated that between 13.3 million and 16.6 million people died either due to the coronavirus directly or because of factors somehow attributed to the pandemic’s impact on health systems, such as cancer patients who were unable to seek treatment when hospitals were full of COVID patients.
Accurately counting COVID-19 deaths has been problematic throughout the pandemic, as reports of confirmed cases represent only a fraction of the devastation wrought by the virus, largely because of limited testing.
Samira Asma, a senior WHO director, acknowledged that “numbers are sometimes controversial” and that all estimates are only an approximation of the virus' catastrophic effects. “Were the mortality rates so low because we couldn’t count the deaths, or was there some other factor to explain that?” he asked, citing the far higher mortality rates in the U.S. and Europe.
Pankhania said that while the estimated COVID-19 death toll still pales in comparison to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which experts estimate caused up to 100 million deaths, the fact that so many people died despite the advances of modern medicine, including vaccines, is shameful.
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