More than 6 million people have died from COVID-19 worldwide, according to official counts. But the more comprehensive toll, tallying deaths directly or indirectly attributable to COVID-19, may be three times higher, according to a new study published in the Lancet.“We can confidently say that the pandemic has killed an extra 18.2 million people,” says Dr. Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics at the University of Washington and a co-author of the paper.Those 18.2 million people represent what epidemiologists refer to as “excess deaths,” or the additional number of people who have died in a given period—in this case, Jan. 1, 2020 to Dec. 31, 2021—compared to the number that would be expected to die in the same span of time in the past. The new study relied on data from 74 countries that tracked excess deaths and used computer models to extrapolate those figures out to 191 countries worldwide.
Source: A New Accounting of COVID-19’s True Death Toll | Time
