COVID-19 fatalities in Morocco, probably fivefold official data, estimates the Economist

77,000 people have died in Morocco during the two years since the pandemic began in 2020, fivefold the official data, estimates the Economist, in a newly published analysis of the Worldwide COVID-19 death toll.

How many people have died because of the covid-19 pandemic? A question that no official data or ambitious study can answer accurately indeed since the answer depends both on the data available, and on how the “because” is defined.

Many people who died while infected with coronavirus were never tested for it, and do not enter the official totals. In contrast, some people whose deaths have been attributed to COVID-19 had other diseases that might have ended their lives in a similar timeframe anyway.

In a newly published analysis, the British magazine examined COVID-19 toll around the world based on the standard method of tracking changes in total mortality: “excess deaths”.

Excess deaths number is the gap between how many people died in a given region during a given time period, regardless of cause, and how many deaths would have been expected if a particular circumstance, such as a natural disaster or disease outbreak, COVID-19, in this case, had not occurred.

Although the official number of deaths caused by COVID-19 worldwide is now at 5.4 million, the new analysis data best estimate is that the actual toll is 18.7 million people.

“We find that there is a 95% chance that the true value lies between 11.7 million and 21.8 million additional deaths,” added the magazine.

As for Morocco, the official data says that up to January 4, the Kingdom lost 14,862 citizens in the two years pandemic battle, the analysis data estimates that the country may have lost more than 77,000 people due to COVID-19.

To reach these numbers, the magazine has built a machine-learning model, which estimates excess deaths for every country every day since the pandemic began. It is based both on official excess-mortality data and on more than 100 other statistical indicators, according to the economist.

Measured by excess deaths as a share of the population, many of the world’s hardest-hit countries are in Latin America.

The analysis says that although Russia’s official death tally suggests that it has protected its citizens tolerably well, its numbers on total mortality imply that it has in fact been hit quite hard by covid-19.

Similarly, the new data estimates that India’s death toll is actually in the millions, rather than the hundreds of thousands. At the other end of the table, a handful of countries have actually had fewer people die during the pandemic than in previous years.

Although excess-deaths statistics are one of the most comprehensive measures of the human cost of covid-19, the method does not incorporate data on demography in each country, new variants, and the rate of vaccinations, important factors that affect the death toll widely but they were not considered in calculating the estimated numbers.