Once we exited the period in which the entire front page of major newspapers was devoted to coronavirus stories (back when it was called the novel coronavirus), it's been harder to find such stories on weekends. The war in Ukraine dominates the front pages now, as well it should, and many inside pages, too. It takes a major development or insightful human interest story to see the coronavirus on the first page or screen now.
The major news I did find this morning concerned WHO's newly reported calculation of the coronavirus's global death toll. WHO added new information from localities and household surveys. They also used statistical models to account for missing cases. The numbers in WHO's total represent "excess mortality" or the number of deaths more than what is normally seen during that time period. In the coronavirus death total WHO counted people who died directly from covid, people who died of complications due to covid, and people who died not having or having had covid but who had a potentially fatal condition go untreated due to covid.
WHO's calculation yielded a number more than double the official toll of six million reported by individual countries: around 15 million as of the end of 2021. WHO says these data are essential for understanding how the pandemic has progressed and what steps could mitigate similar future crises. The sticking point is that India is disputing the calculation of its death toll. It also doesn't want the WHO total becoming public (given that I found the total, it's already public). Over a third of the additional nine million deaths, about four million, are said to have come from India. India maintains that its death toll is in the neighborhood of 520,000.
Some of the members of the WHO committee issuing the report say that India's complaints have actually helped ensure the accuracy of the result. A statistics and biostatistics professor at the University of Washington who helped build the model noted that they had "gone overboard in terms of model checks," and that they had done as much as they possibly could given the available data. I'm siding with WHO on this one.
1 comment:
I'd forgotten about the excess mortality reports here, they have been released weekly but are just about to move to monthly. Clearly we're at the stage in the pandemic where things are slowing down, death reporting included.
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