COVID pandemic death toll may be 3 times higher than official tally, new study finds
CBSN
Two years after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic, new research suggests around 18.2 million people have died worldwide as a result. That toll is more than three times higher than the WHO's tally of nearly 6 million officially reported COVID-19 deaths through the end of 2021.
Some 1.13 million Americans have died due to the pandemic, the researchers estimate. By comparison, the current total of reported COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. stands at around 960,000.
The new figures, published Thursday in The Lancet, are based on the number of "excess deaths" in countries around the world. Researchers determined how many additional deaths occurred from January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2021 by modeling the number of "expected" deaths in years unaffected by a global pandemic, compared to the total number who actually died from any cause.
