It is a sad truth that more people died than expected in the first two years of the corona pandemic. The WHO is now refining its estimates of excess mortality. Also for Germany she makes a new calculation.

According to an evaluation, the excess mortality worldwide in the first two years of the corona pandemic in 2020 and 2021 was significantly higher than the officially reported Covid 19 death toll. The discrepancy was particularly large in middle-income countries, as the World Health Organization (WHO) reports in the journal Nature.

According to this, around 14.83 million more people died worldwide in the two years than would have been expected without the pandemic. The WHO had already reported 14.9 million additional deaths in May. She has now refined the analysis for publication in Nature.

For Germany, the WHO data analysis team recalculated the original estimate and concluded that there was an excess mortality of 122,000 – rather than 195,000 – over the two years. A study by the University of Duisburg-Essen also took demographic trends into account for 2020 and came to the conclusion that some of the additional deaths were due to the growing number of people over 80.

Middle-income countries in South America were particularly affected by high excess mortality, as the WHO reports in “Nature”. Peru had almost twice as many deaths as would have been expected. In Mexico, Bolivia and Ecuador the number was 50 percent higher.

In poorer countries, the excess mortality was not as high because the population there is usually younger and therefore fewer people died of Covid-19, the analysis also says. Globally, the excess mortality was therefore more than two and a half times as high as the reported Covid 19 deaths alone would have suggested: At the end of 2021, the WHO statistics showed 5.4 million Covid 19 deaths. However, the now published figure of 14.83 million also includes deaths where the cause of death was not correctly stated, those from patients who were suspected to be infected but not tested, and deaths from people with illnesses or injuries that were not treated in time due to the overload of the health systems could become.

A comment by Enrique Acosta from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in “Nature” said that the numbers should be viewed with caution because only 37 percent of countries had monthly statistics with all deaths . 43 percent of the countries did not present any figures at all. The statisticians therefore had to make assumptions that Acosta believes are sometimes problematic.