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Coronavirus pandemic
ChinaScience

WHO data on excess Covid-19 deaths aims to reveal true human cost of brutal pandemic

  • ‘A lot of people died outside of the health systems. We don’t know what they died of,’ WHO data chief says in underlining need to find true toll
  • WHO earlier put total global Covid-related deaths in 2020 at 3 million, compared with the officially reported 1.8 million

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A nurse checks on a patient in a Covid-19 isolation ward in the Chinese city of Wuhan, in Hubei province, during the early days of the pandemic in 2020. Photo: AP
Zhuang Pinghui
The staggering Covid-19 death toll reported worldwide has highlighted just how catastrophic the pandemic has been, but its true human cost is likely to be revealed as vastly larger when the World Health Organization releases its own data next week.

About 5.4 million people were reported to have died of Covid-19 between January 2020 and December 2021, but the figure was “underestimated” and “problematic”, according to Steve MacFeely, WHO’s director of data and analytics.

One problem was the lack of consistency in how countries measured the impact of the pandemic and assessed Covid-19 mortality, MacFeely told a webinar hosted by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP).

Access to testing and diagnostic capacity also varied widely across countries, while overwhelmed healthcare systems could have led to undercounting.

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Inside a Shanghai Covid-19 makeshift hospital where ‘lights are on all night’

Inside a Shanghai Covid-19 makeshift hospital where ‘lights are on all night’

“A lot of people died outside of the health systems. We don’t know what they died of,” MacFeely said. “This is one of the reasons why the numbers that we publish on direct Covid-19 mortality need to be supplemented with a stronger measure.”

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