Nearly two years into a pandemic that continues to rage, the world has now reported its 5 millionth COVID-19 death, according to a count of global deaths maintained by Johns Hopkins University.
That figure is almost equivalent to the total population of New Zealand.
On average, more than 7,000 people are reported as dying of COVID-19 each day. Since April 2020, the number of daily deaths has dropped below 4,000 fewer than 20 times.
But official figures reported by national governments fail to capture the true toll of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Firstly, for every official COVID death there are many more people who have grieved loved ones, been struck seriously ill themselves, or suffered the effects of long COVID.
And the official death toll itself is likely to be vastly underestimated.
Professor Alan Lopez, a leading international expert on disease burden and health statistics, believes 5 million is a very inaccurate count of the pandemic's death toll. Professor Lopez says the actual figure is likely to be between 12 and 15 million — or close to half of Australia's total population.
This is because deaths are only included in the tally if COVID-19 is officially determined to have been a factor.
Yet many people have died without ever knowing they have the virus. Others who died from non-COVID causes may not have done so if hospital systems had not been so stretched. Other COVID-19 deaths have occurred outside the health system, and were therefore never counted in the official toll.
"People are saying 5 million, but in reality, it's much more than that," says Professor Ali Mokdad from the United States' Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).
"There is a huge difference between what is being reported, and what is out there in terms of the true number of deaths."
Another way to measure deaths
The clearer way to understand the death toll of the pandemic is by looking at each nation's "excess deaths". This figure reflects the number of people who have died for any reason since the pandemic began, over and above the average number of people that are expected to die in a typical year.
"Mortality is pretty steady, year after year after year," Professor Lopez says. "If you look over the last three or four years and you average out the mortality of each week … and then you look at what's happened in 2020 and 2021, the excess deaths in the absence of anything else are highly likely to be attributable to the various effects of COVID-19."
And many countries — even with no shortage of vaccines — are still recording many more deaths than in the pre-pandemic baseline.
The United States is one of those nations. The US is currently recording as many as 20,000 deaths a week over and above historical norms.
Professor Mokdad estimates that only around 50 per cent of COVID-19 cases are being detected in the United States.
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Analysis by The Economist estimates the true global death toll to be somewhere between double and four times the reported figures. This would put the real death toll anywhere between 10.2 million and 19.2 million.
The publication's model puts the most likely figure at more than 16 million deaths, more than triple the figures being reported by authorities.
But there's a lot of uncertainty around those estimates. Many countries don't report death statistics in a timely manner, or even in some cases at all.
This is a significant flaw with using such estimates to drive policy. As Professor Lopez says: "There's no point, for COVID policy today, talking about COVID deaths six months ago."
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After a dreadful 2020 and the first half of 2021, South America is now reporting below 15 per cent of the world's weekly deaths.
But as the pandemic landscape shifts along with growing vaccination rates, Professor Lopez believes it's crucial to get the statistics right to allow for planning and response to emerging surges in case numbers.
"Government policy ought to be informed by timely, reliable information on who's dying of what and how that is changing," he says.
"If we have the COVID numbers wrong we may vastly underestimate the impact of what's undoubtedly a very big pandemic, that has already killed 12 to 15 million people in the last 18 months and may kill that number in the next 18 months unless we are able to control it."
The lower the vax rate, the higher the hospitalizations,
and the more pressure there is on healthcare resources,
which makes it harder for them to handle everything else.
stop being so fucking stoopid
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