Covid: The Global Killer: How many more deaths to come in 2021?
As we approach close to a year into the coronavirus pandemic, the official global death toll currently exceeds one million people. But researchers warn that this figure probably vastly underestimates the actual number of people who have died from COVID-19. And, in a worst-case scenario, one group of modellers suggests that the number of deaths could exceed 3 million people by January 2021.
The one-million milestone was already hit back on 28 September 2020, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center programme, USA.
But more likely that this number “was exceeded some time ago”, said Andrea Gómez Ayora, an epidemiologist at the University of Chile in Santiago to Nature magazine back in September 2020. (Nature: Sept 2020)
Many deaths related to the coronavirus have gone unreported, she said particularly in countries where testing isn’t widespread. The death toll will continue to rise as diagnostic capacity increases around the globe.
“We could have avoided many of these deaths,” said Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle in speaking to Nature in September 2020.
“For example, in the United States — which has the highest national death toll, at more than 200,000 — it is likely that a national mandate on wearing face masks in public would have helped to reduce the rates of coronavirus transmission, ”
How many more deaths we will see in the next months will depend on how governments respond to the pandemic, Mokdad added.
Using official data on COVID-19 from different nations, the (IHME) projected the global impact of the pandemic under several scenarios. The researchers estimate that, if current trends continue, by next January the total number of deaths will reach 2.5 million, a figure that could be cut to 1.8 million if every country adopts universal mask-wearing. Their models suggest that if at least 95% of the population starts wearing a mask within 7 days, the average number of daily deaths expected by January could drop from the current projection of almost 33,300 to around 17,450.
But, under different conditions, the situation could worsen.
If governments lift precautions such as social distancing and restrictions on gatherings, the death toll could climb further, reaching 2 to 3 million by January 2021, with around 72,700 people dying each day. “We are heading into a difficult time,” said Mokdad.
The pandemic will also cause deaths that are not included in the official COVID-19 tally, he adds, because of knock-on effects that are beginning to emerge. These include a decline in childhood vaccinations as people avoid clinics, rising consumption of alcohol and illegal drugs, and increased mortality from other diseases as overstretched health-care systems struggle to keep them at bay.
Other researchers are hopeful that the death count passing the one-million mark could represent a turning point in the course of the pandemic.
Naomi Rogers, U.S historian of medicine at Yale University commented: “I hope that there’s something about the notion of a million, which is such a powerful number, that this could potentially be a kind of wake-up moment.”
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has current projections of 2.4 Million global deaths by February 2021.
Sources
John Hopkins University of Medicine: Coronavirus Resource Center. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/
Nature Issue: Sept 2020
http://feeds.nature.com/~r/nature/rss/current/~3/zxojIApk1lQ/d41586-020-02762-y
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation http://www.healthdata.org
