Pandemic death toll at end of 2021 may have hit 15 million people, WHO estimates

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, more than double the official death toll of six million. Most of the fatalities were in Southeast Asia, Europe and the Americas.

In a report released on Thursday, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described the figure as "sobering," saying it should prompt countries to invest more in their capacities to quell future health emergencies.

Scientists tasked by WHO with calculating the actual number of COVID-19 deaths between January 2020 and the end of last year estimated there were between 13.3 million and 16.6 million deaths that were either caused directly by the coronavirus or were somehow attributed to the pandemic's impact on health systems, like people with cancer unable to seek treatment when hospitals were full of patients with the virus.

The figures are based on country-reported data and statistical modelling. 

"This may seem like just a bean-counting exercise, but having these WHO numbers is so critical to understanding how we should combat future pandemics and continue to respond to this one," said Albert Ko, an infectious diseases specialist at the Yale School of Public Health who was not linked to the WHO research.

For example, Ko said, South Korea's decision to invest heavily in public health after it suffered a severe outbreak of MERS allowed it to escape COVID-19 with a per-capita death rate around 1/20th of that of the U.S.

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Nearly one-third of the excess total was estimated to be in India, at 4.7 million. The country, which suffered a devastating wave spurred by the Delta variant in 2021, had said at the end of that year its COVID-19 deaths stood at 481,080 people.

India's case count matched a general trend in the data, which saw 68 per cent of the excess death toll concentrated in 10 highly populated, middle-income countries, a list that includes Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia and Mexico.

Countries in Europe and North America where modelling suggests that official death tolls are an undercount include the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, Poland and Ukraine.

Other countries that ranked high on the excess death modelling included Brazil, Colombia, Iran, Philippines, Peru, Russia and South Africa.

WHO officials noted a significant disparity by gender, with men accounting for 57 per cent of the estimated deaths, while older adults were disproportionately affected compared to the share of population.

Statistics Canada has previously estimated there were 16,333 more deaths in the country by the end of 2020 than otherwise would be expected before the pandemic. Last month, the statistics agency estimated excess deaths between the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020 through to the end of November 2021 at 28,987 people.

The WHO data does not appear to deviate greatly from those figures but provides context on the evolution of the virus over time. In 2020, 57.3 per cent of the excess deaths were estimated to be in those 80 and over, although the 25-39 demographic saw deaths nearly 11 per cent above what might have been expected in the absence of the pandemic. Nearly 70 per cent of the excess deaths were of men.