THE WAGES OF NOT CARING ABOUT OTHERS:

There have been more than 6.65 million officially reported Covid deaths since the virus was first identified in China in December 2019, according to the World Health Organization.

However countries count Covid deaths differently and methods have changed throughout the pandemic.

Attributing deaths to Covid can be a very difficult exercise, said Antoine Flahault, director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva.

The death of a patient in a hospital in a developed country who had already been diagnosed with Covid could be straightforward but that is often not the case and doctors "usually do no have much information" to guide them, Flahault told AFP.

Instead researchers have sought to compare the total number of deaths from all causes recorded since 2020 to what would have been expected if there had been no pandemic.

Using these figures, researchers from the WHO reported in the journal Nature earlier this month that there were 14.83 million excess deaths from Covid in 2020 and 2021, updating a figure first released in May. 

That is nearly three times higher than the 5.4 million officially reported Covid deaths over those two years.

Research from the US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimated in March that the number was an even higher 18.2 million.

But Flahault said that even these figures could "perhaps still be an underestimate".

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