How many people has the coronavirus killed?

How many people has the coronavirus killed?

How many people has the coronavirus killed?

More than 850,000 people have been recorded as having died of COVID-19. But measures of excess deaths — all deaths from any cause, compared with the expected number — suggest that the true number might be much higher, meaning that some COVID-19 deaths have been misclassified. Other causes of death might have also risen, such as in cases when people couldn’t get the medical care they needed from overburdened hospitals. A Nature analysis of comprehensive data sets including 32 countries (largely in Europe) and 4 major world cities shows that there are huge variations in excess deaths between countries. Some countries, such as Bulgaria, have even experienced negative excess deaths during the pandemic so far — meaning that, despite the virus, fewer people have died this year than expected. This could be due to factors such as fewer road deaths during lockdown and hygiene practices that help to quash other infectious diseases. And excess death is just one measure of the true toll of the pandemic. The final tally will take a long time to determine, and will never be absolutely certain. “We haven’t even settled on how many people died in the 1918 flu,” says demographer Andrew Noymer. “And we’ve had 100 years to sort out the numbers.”
Nature | 11 min read