蜜芽传媒

Research shows that the global death toll for Covid-19 was grossly underestimated and may be three times more than current official figures show. After studying mortality data from 191 countries, researchers at Washington University conclude more than 18 million people have probably died from Covid.

Their report comes two years to the day from when the World Health Organization first declared the pandemic.

The researchers measured "excess deaths" - how many more people died than expected when compared to recent years. This method estimates the UK's total to be similar to official records, at about 173,000, and suggests the highest rates were in Bolivia, Bulgaria, Eswatini, North Macedonia and Lesotho.

Professor Tulio de Oliveira, the director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation in South Africa, who also led the team which first discovered the Omicron variant gave Newsday his take on the new findings.

鈥淲hat you have to imagine especially in lower resourced settings, where the hospitals get overwhelmed a lot of times, it is difficult to record the number of deaths.鈥�

鈥淣ow, for example in South Africa, despite that we had a very large number of Omicron infections we had very low excess deaths. And that shows the real power of vaccination and preparing hospitals to react to a sudden increase in cases.鈥�

(Pic: A woman in her personal protective equipment gear holds the hand of a coronavirus disease positive patient ; Credit: Reuters)

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