The World Health Organization is estimating the COVID-19 pandemic has killed nearly 15 million people directly or indirectly. The number is far higher than most official counts which put the global death toll at about five-and-a-half million. In its report, the World Health Organization calculated there were 14.9 million excess deaths over the past two years. This includes people who died with COVID, as well as those who died due to the pandemic’s impact on overwhelmed healthcare systems.
I am surprised at the reaction of the Indian government, primarily, to the WHO report on excess deaths and its estimate of the true toll of the pandemic, especially in India. But it didn’t come as a surprise to anyone who was following mortality news through the pandemic. There have been previous estimates by independent researchers and magazines, such as The Economist, which also suggested that we were looking at numbers that were far, far higher than the official figures that were released, estimated.
I think that the most significant thing here for me as a citizen and a resident of India is the fact that the Indian government has so vociferously denied the numbers that the WHO released. And the reason that they’re loath to admit that nearly 5 million people, as opposed to a little over 500,000 people by their estimate, died during the pandemic
— source democracynow.org | May 06, 2022
