YOU CAN'T LOCK DOWN TOO HARD:

The recorded death count from the Covid-19 pandemic as of Thursday is nearing 2 million. The true extent is far worse.

More than 2.8 million people have lost their lives due to the pandemic, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 59 countries and jurisdictions. This tally offers the most comprehensive view yet of the pandemic's global impact. Deaths in these places last year surged more than 12% above average levels.

Less than two-thirds of that surge has been attributed directly to Covid-19. Public-health experts believe that many, if not most, of the additional deaths were directly linked to the disease, particularly early in the pandemic when testing was sparse. Some of those excess deaths came from indirect fallout, from health-care disruptions, people avoiding the hospital and other issues.

To better understand the pandemic's global toll, the Journal compiled the most recent available data on deaths from all causes from countries with available records. These countries together account for roughly one-quarter of the world's population but about three-quarters of all reported deaths from Covid-19 through late last year.

The tally found more than 821,000 additional deaths that aren't accounted for in governments' official Covid-19 death counts.

Only about one in four countries world-wide track deaths on a running basis--and few of those have data more recent than November. The countries in the Journal's tally would likely have counted about 15 million deaths through late fall without the pandemic, based on prior-year trends. Instead, they reported nearly 17 million deaths through that time period. The difference equals roughly the population of Nebraska.

Tracking all of these deaths, and doing it quickly, is vital to help understand the breadth of the crisis, public-health experts say.

"Measuring total deaths gives you a readout if things are getting better or worse," said Colin Mathers, a retired coordinator of the World Health Organization's Mortality and Health Analysis Unit. "If you see a sudden rise in heart disease, it may be linked to Covid-19, but if there's a rise in cancer it may be because of people fearing to go to the hospital."

Some countries, including New Zealand and Norway, are actually showing lower-than-expected deaths. This may be the effect of controlling the virus through behavior changes that tamp down other causes of death, such as increased hygiene and reduced social interactions that spread other diseases, researchers say.

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