COVID-19 caused 15 million deaths globally, not 5 million reported earlier says WHO

 Half of the unaccounted deaths caused by COVID-19 occurred in India from 2020-to 2021

A new World Health Organisation (WHO) report has revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic caused three times more deaths globally than reported earlier. According to the official figures reported to WHO earlier. The world health body earlier reported 5.4 million deaths from COVID-19

There were 14.9 million excess deaths associated with Covid-19 by the end of 2021, the UN body said on Thursday. The official count of deaths directly attributable to Covid-19 and reported to WHO in that period, from January 2020 to the end of December 2021, is slightly more than 5.4 million.

The WHO report said that almost half of the deaths that until now had not been counted were in India. The report suggests that 4.7 million people died there as a result of the pandemic, mainly during a huge surge in May and June 2021.

The Indian government, however, puts its death toll for the January 2020-December 2021 period far lower: about 480,000.

The WHO's excess mortality figures reflect people who died of Covid-19 as well as those who died as an indirect result of the outbreak, including people who could not access healthcare for other conditions when systems were overwhelmed during huge waves of infection.

It also accounts for deaths averted during the pandemic, for example, because of the lower risk of traffic accidents during lockdowns.

But the numbers are also far higher than the official tally because of deaths that were missed in countries without adequate reporting. Even pre-pandemic, around six in 10 deaths around the world were not registered, WHO said.

In a statement issued after the numbers were published, the Indian government said WHO had released the report "without adequately addressing India's concerns" over what it called "questionable" methods.

The WHO panel, made up of international experts who have been working on the data for months, used a combination of national and local information, as well as statistical models, to estimate totals where the data is incomplete – a methodology that India has criticised.

However, other independent assessments have also put the death toll in India far higher than the official government tally, including a report published in science that suggested 3 million people may have died of COVID in the country.

Other models have also reached similar conclusions about the global death toll being far higher than the recorded statistics. For comparison, around 50 million people are thought to have died in the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and 36 million have died of HIV since the epidemic began in the 1980s.

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