WHO claims that COVID-19 took “hundreds of millions of lives.”
The “World Health Organisation” reported on Friday that the premature deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic cost about “337 million life years” in the first two years.
The annual world statistics report from the “UN health agency” also highlighted the growing danger posed by “non-communicable diseases (NCDs),” such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
Based on data up to 2022, the estimate of the number of lives COVID had taken was the most shocking finding, according to WHO.
Officially, the pandemic has claimed the lives of close to seven million people, but it is believed that the true death toll is closer to twenty million.
The WHO report makes clear how the virus itself and the crisis’s wider effects abruptly ended the lives of millions of people.
Although the WHO reported “5.4 million COVID deaths” in 2020 and 2021, its excess mortality data reveals that over that time, the crisis is likely to have claimed the lives of up to 14.9 million people.
Perhaps even more startlingly, it claimed that just in those two years, COVID had cost the world “336.8 million years” that would have been lived if it hadn’t been for the disease.
The WHO’s assistant director for data and analytics, Samira Asma, told reporters prior to the launch that each extra death is like losing 22 years of life.
The WHO issued a warning, noting that many health-related indicators that had been improving for years had been thrown off course by the pandemic.
During the first two decades of the century, maternal and child mortality rates considerably decreased, with reductions of one-third and fifty percent, respectively.
Infectious mortality from HIV, TB, and malaria as well as the incidence of NCDs also saw considerable declines. The average lifespan worldwide increased from 67 years in 2000 to 73 years in 2019.
However, after the pandemic struck, already-present disparities in access to “high-quality healthcare,” regular immunisations, and financial security widened, among other things, turning the long-improving trends in malaria and TB in the opposite direction.
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