For more than 100 countries studied, at least 40% more deaths due to #COVID19 than reported.

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Peter Aldhous
@paldhous
·
Aug 3, 2021
THREAD: Final version of estimates of excess deaths from #COVID19 using World Mortality Dataset by @ArielKarlinsky @hippopedoid is now published @eLife
https://elifesciences.org/articles/69336
For more than 100 countries studied, at least 40% more deaths due to #COVID19 than reported.
Image

Peter Aldhous
@paldhous
True figure will be higher, because mortality data lacking for countries shown in gray. If there is a similar undercount across these nations, global toll would be an extra ~1.7 million deaths on top of existing count of ~4.2 million.
https://elifesciences.org/articles/69336
Image

https://elifesciences.org/articles/69336

Abstract

Comparing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic between countries or across time is difficult because the reported numbers of cases and deaths can be strongly affected by testing capacity and reporting policy. Excess mortality, defined as the increase in all-cause mortality relative to the expected mortality, is widely considered as a more objective indicator of the COVID-19 death toll. However, there has been no global, frequently updated repository of the all-cause mortality data across countries. To fill this gap, we have collected weekly, monthly, or quarterly all-cause mortality data from 103 countries and territories, openly available as the regularly updated World Mortality Dataset. We used this dataset to compute the excess mortality in each country during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that in several worst-affected countries (Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico) the excess mortality was above 50% of the expected annual mortality (Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico) or above 400 excess deaths per 100,000 population (Peru, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Serbia). At the same time, in several other countries (e.g. Australia and New Zealand) mortality during the pandemic was below the usual level, presumably due to social distancing measures decreasing the non-COVID infectious mortality. Furthermore, we found that while many countries have been reporting the COVID-19 deaths very accurately, some countries have been substantially underreporting their COVID-19 deaths (e.g. Nicaragua, Russia, Uzbekistan), by up to two orders of magnitude (Tajikistan). Our results highlight the importance of open and rapid all-cause mortality reporting for pandemic monitoring.

*snip*