As the Covid-19 pandemic runs on, how bad is it looking?
An article in today’s “Guardian” newspaper reports a new estimate of the Covid-19 global death toll:
“The Covid-19 pandemic may have claimed 18.2 million lives around the world, more than three times the official death toll, a new study suggests.
The higher figure is a better estimate of the true global casualty figure to the end of 2021, according to an analysis by a consortium of health researchers published in the Lancet.
They have based their calculation on the number of “excess deaths” which they believe were caused directly or indirectly by the pandemic. These are calculated by looking at the difference between the number of deaths recorded from all causes and the number of expected based on previous patterns.”
We don’t know the death toll from the so-called Spanish flu of 1918-1920. It is usually estimated as between 20 – 50 million, but the lowest estimate is 17 million and the highest is 100 million. So we have now reached the situation with Covid-19 when the latest estimate for the global death toll is similar to the lowest estimate for the toll of Spanish flu.,
The situation for Britain is interesting. The death toll from Spanish flu was 228,000. So far, the official death toll for Covid-19 is about 173,000. So again the death toll is similar to that of Spanish flu.