How Many People Have Died of Covid-19?
Why the true number of deaths is probably higher than our official count
The Covid-19 pandemic has been fraught with unknowns, from the nature of the disease to broader societal impacts and everything in between. The last 15 months have often been more about the endless cavalcade of things we don’t really understand than the few facts we can be sure of.
Nowhere is this more true than in the figures we take for granted as accurate. I wrote recently about how unsure we are of the true number of Covid-19 cases in the world. There’s another place where precise figures are much more fluid than you might imagine.
I’m talking about the number of people who have died from Covid-19.
Now, the initial response to the question of how many people have died is to simply go to one of the many excellent dashboards that collate worldwide Covid-19 data and simply read off the figures. According to most data collations, the number is somewhere around 3 million deaths as of April 2021, and still steadily climbing.
