May 5, 2022

Nearly three times as many people have died as a result of COVID-19 as official data indicates, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report that offers the most comprehensive look yet at the true global toll of the pandemic.

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.

Nearly 50 percent of the deaths that until now had not been counted were in India, WHO said, where 4.7 million people were reported to have died as a result of the pandemic – a tally 10 times higher than the country’s own official figure and almost a third of the global total.

Read more:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/5/who-puts-global-covid-19-death-toll-at-nearly-15-million