Covid in the world, the dead could be millions more: study

The global death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic has reached 5.5 million. This is what the official accounts of nearly 2 years of Sars-CoV -2 say. But some estimates suggest that excess deaths worldwide are “double or even four times” this figure. The number that appears in the official death tally could therefore be underestimated. This is what we read in ‘Nature’ online, in a service that reports the analysis of an observed gap: “The excess mortality data, a measurement that implies the comparison of all deaths registered with those that should occur, show that many more people died during the pandemic. Calculating how many more is a complex research challenge, “he explains. It’s not easy because “some official data about it are wrong,” the scientists found. “And more than 100 countries do not collect reliable statistics on expected or actual deaths at all, or do not release them in a timely manner.” Demographers, data scientists and public health experts are trying to reduce the uncertainties for a global estimate of deaths in the pandemic. With methods ranging from satellite imagery of cemeteries to door-to-door surveys and machine learning computer models that seek to extrapolate global estimates from available data. Among these, the World Health Organization (WHO) is working on its first global estimate, but other bodies offer updates on this issue, and projections. Including media: London’s ‘The Economist’ magazine used an approach and developed a model that estimates a death toll between 2 and 4 times higher than the official one. The excess mortality with the Covid pandemic, according to some calculations, would be the largest since the Spanish flu, with an excess mortality rate per capita estimated at between 0.15 and 0.28%, and only exceeded by the pandemic of 1918 (1%). An example of the pitfalls that can be encountered in calculating how much submerged there is in the statistics on Covid deaths comes from an experience in Germany. “We should be careful, because looking at the average raw data is really imperfect,” says Giacomo De Nicola, statistician at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. When De Nicola and colleagues worked on a 2021 study to calculate the excess mortality caused by the pandemic in Germany, they found that comparing deaths to mean mortality in previous years consistently underestimated the number of expected deaths and thus overestimated deaths. in excess.