Making sense of WHO’s exorbitant Covid-19 death toll

According to the most recent World Health Organization (WHO) data released on May 5, the total Covid-19 death toll worldwide in 2020 and 2021 could be nearly three times higher than previously reported.

Nearly 54 lakh people were reported to have died as a result of the highly contagious disease in the first two years of the pandemic. According to the WHO, the actual death toll is close to 1.5 crore. To put it another way, nearly 95 lakh deaths went unreported.

According to the WHO report, “the global excess mortality associated with Covid-19 was 14.91 million” between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2021, “representing 9.49 million more deaths than those globally reported as directly attributable to Covid-19.”