18 Million Died Of Covid Worldwide, 3 Times Official Tally: Study

Because of its large population, India alone accounted for an estimated 22% of the global Covid deaths.

The pandemic's death count may be three times higher than official Covid-19 records suggest, according to a study that found stark differences across countries and regions.

As many as 18.2 million people probably died from Covid in the first two years of the pandemic, researchers found in the first peer-reviewed global estimate of excess deaths. They pointed to a lack of testing and unreliable mortality data to explain the discrepancy with official estimates of roughly 5.9 million deaths.

"At the global level, this is quite the biggest mortality shock since the Spanish flu," said Christopher J.L. Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, where the study was conducted. Covid drove a 17% jump in deaths worldwide, he said in an interview. The flu pandemic that began in 1918 killed at least 50 million people.

The findings, published in the Lancet medical journal, focused on excess deaths to avoid under-counting and assess the extent of the pandemic's devastation. While deaths continued to accumulate, the scientists compared the mortality between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2021 to comparable data for the prior years.