Professor Lopez says the actual figure is likely to be between 12 and 15 million — or close to half of Australia's total population. This is because deaths are only included in the tally if COVID is officially determined to have been a factor. Yet many people have died without ever knowing they have the virus. Others who died from non-COVID causes may not have done so if hospital systems had not been so stretched.
Other COVID deaths have occurred outside the health system, and were therefore never counted in the official toll. The clearer way to understand the death toll of the pandemic is by looking at each nation's "excess deaths". This figure reflects the number of people who have died for any reason since the pandemic began, over and above the average number of people that are expected to die in a typical year.
And many countries — even with no shortage of vaccines — are still recording many more deaths than in the pre-pandemic baseline. The United States is one of those nations. The US is currently recording as many as 20, deaths a week over and above historical norms.
High vaccination rates have helped some countries, which suffered through a dreadful , record relatively few excess deaths in That includes Spain, one of the hardest-hit countries in the very early waves of the pandemic. Australia, with its relatively small case numbers, has not recorded significant excess deaths, although all-cause mortality data for the lockdowns in the second half of have not yet been released by the ABS.
Analysis by The Economist estimates the true global death toll to be somewhere between double and four times the reported figures. This would put the real death toll anywhere between The publication's model puts the most likely figure at more than 16 million deaths, more than triple the figures being reported by authorities. But there's a lot of uncertainty around those estimates.
Many countries don't report death statistics in a timely manner, or even in some cases at all. This is a significant flaw with using such estimates to drive policy. The country with the highest excess death levels through the pandemic is Peru.
The country's weak health system played a significant role in the catastrophic outcome. Hospitals were overwhelmed, and demand for oxygen far outstripped supply.
According to an article published by The BMJ medical journal , Peru has just 1, intensive care beds for its 33 million population. Diverse groups are thought to have lived in different locations across Africa for the first two-thirds of human history. Around B. Table 1 displays very rough figures representing averages of an estimate of ranges given by the United Nations and other sources.
Slow population growth over the 8,year period—from an estimated 5 million in B. In all likelihood, human populations in different regions grew or declined in response to food availability, the variability of animal herds, periods of peace or hostility, and changing weather and climatic conditions.
Poston Jr. In any case, life was short. Life expectancy at birth probably averaged only about 10 years for most of human history. Average life expectancy in Iron Age France from B. Under these conditions, the birth rate would have to be about 80 live births per 1, people just for the species to survive. To put that in perspective, a high birth rate today is about 35 to 45 live births per 1, population, and it is observed in only some sub-Saharan African countries. These short life expectancies mean that the human population had a hard time increasing.
Other historians, however, set the figure twice as high, suggesting how imprecise population estimates of early historical periods can be. The average annual rate of growth was actually lower in this period than the rate suggested for B.
One reason for the unusually slower growth was the Black Death. This dreaded plague was not limited to 14th-century Europe but may have begun in western Asia in about C. Experts believe that half the Byzantine Empire was destroyed by plague in the sixth century, a total of million deaths. Such large fluctuations in population size over long periods greatly compound the difficulty of estimating the number of people who have ever lived.
By , however, the world population passed the 1 billion mark and has since continued to grow to its current 7. This growth is driven in large part by advances in public health, medicine, and nutrition that have lowered death rates, allowing more people to live far into their reproductive years.
Guesstimating the number of people ever born requires determining population sizes for different points in human prehistory and history and applying assumed birth rates to each period. It would be many more today. While the number of reported deaths is closer to reality than either the documented number of Covid infections or Covid hospitalizations, according to the CDC, the officially reported death totals do not capture the entire universe of Covid deaths.
The CDC lists several reasons, including: the death can occur weeks after infection, it can be attributed to another cause, and Covid can make underlying conditions worse, and so the death can be attributed to another illness. Comparing Covid data with excess deaths. The CDC, in addition to monitoring Covid data, also monitors total deaths of any kind.
As the New York Times recently noted about Florida , the current data suggested the number of total deaths in that state during first week of August was 5,, far above the average expected number of deaths -- 3, -- based on previous years.
The state acknowledged fewer than 1, Covid deaths for that week in its weekly official release of Covid data. Florida's percentage of excess deaths remains far above much of the rest of the country. See the CDC's state-by-state breakdown here. Deaths due to Covid, but not from Covid The Covid pandemic has also caused more people to die for other reasons than Covid, according to estimates. The University of Washington's Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation IHME changed its reporting back in May , to argue the toll of the virus has been much higher than previously acknowledged when it included the estimates of this excess mortality attributable to the effects of Covid on society in addition to the disease itself.
Covid deaths were more than , at the time, but pandemic-related deaths were closer to , in the US. In addition to the reported Covid deaths, IHME tries to account for excess deaths that can be attributed to:. It then subtracts reductions in deaths due to other viruses, injuries and air pollution. Those excess death projections were not a part of the IHME projection -- its best guess -- that more than , more Americans will die of Covid before the end of the year.
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