Five years after the coronavirus changed daily life on the planet, a new estimate once again puts the true human cost of the pandemic into debate. Although official records reported a significantly lower figure, an international analysis maintains that COVID-19 would have caused around 22 million deaths in the world, almost three times more than officially recorded.
The estimate arises from a study led by researchers from the London College of Hygiene & Tropical Treatment, which analyzed the global impact of the pandemic from the excess mortalitya methodology used to measure how many people died above what was expected in a given period.
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Why would the figure be much higher than the official one?
He official COVID death count It depended, for much of the pandemic, on each country’s ability to detect cases, confirm diagnoses and record deaths in real time. This generated enormous differences between countries.
In many places, especially during the first months of the outbreak, diagnostic tests were lacking, hospitals were overwhelmed, and millions of people died without formal confirmation of infection.
For this reason, specialists usually consider the excess mortality indicatorwhich compares how many people died during the pandemic with respect to the average expected under normal conditions.
This method allows us to include not only deaths directly caused by the virus, but also indirect deaths linked to the health impact of the crisis.
The WHO had already warned about under-reporting
The World Health Organization had already pointed out that the official steadiness significantly underestimated the true impact of the pandemic.
In May 2022, the agency estimated that almost 15 million people had died directly or indirectly from COVID between 2020 and 2021, a figure much higher than official reports at that time.
United States, among the hardest hit countries
According to the Facilities for Disease Withhold watch over and Prevention, The United States has recorded more than 1.2 million COVID-related deaths since the start of the pandemic.
However, different epidemiological analyzes maintain that even that figure could fall short, especially in the initial stage of the emergency, when there were no vaccines and the health system was under extreme pressure.
A global wound that remains open
Beyond the exact figure, the scientific consensus is that The actual impact of COVID was considerably greater than official records reflect.
The pandemic not only left millions of dead: it also caused hospital crises, massive interruptions in medical treatments, prolonged sequelae in patients with long COVID and social and economic changes whose effects still persist.
Five years later, the debate is no longer just how many officially died, but how many lives were actually lost without being recorded.
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