The coronavirus pandemic could have been much worse without vaccines, according to a new study that states that the number of deaths recorded worldwide by coronavirus would be more than three times what it is today.
The year after the vaccine was introduced in December 2020, more than 4.3 billion people received an inoculation, saving 20 million lives, according to research published Thursday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Had the World Health Organization’s goal of 40% vaccination coverage reached by the end of 2021 in low-income countries, an additional 600,000 lives would have been saved, according to the study.
The findings “quantify the extent to which the pandemic could have been worse if we didn’t have these vaccines,” said Oliver Watson, principal investigator at Imperial College London.
“Catastrophic would be the first word that comes to my mind,” Watson said of the deaths that would have occurred without widespread vaccination.
More than 6.3 million people have died from the coronavirus, including more than a million Americans, according to Our World in Data. More than 40,000 New York City residents died from the virus, health officials said.
The researchers studied data from all 195 countries in the world except ten and found that vaccines prevented 19.8 million total deaths, including 4.2 million deaths in India and 1.9 million in the US.
One million people in Brazil were also saved from death by the virus from vaccines, as well as more than half a million people in both France and the United Kingdom, the researchers said.
The study found that 14.4 million deaths were prevented when only reported COVID-19 deaths were counted, but the number of lives saved grew significantly when scientists considered the probable deaths linked to the virus. .
About 4.3 billion people received a vaccine against COVID the year after its introduction.AP
The study had some important limitations. According to the researchers, China, the most populous country in the world, was among the countries excluded from the study due to lack of information about the effect of the virus on its huge citizenship. The effect of mask use, blockade, and possible mutations in COVID-19 in the absence of the virus were also not considered in the study.
An unpublished model from the Seattle Institute of Health Metrics and Assessment estimated that vaccines saved 16.3 million lives.
“We may not agree on the number as scientists, but we all agree that vaccines against VOCID saved many lives,” said Ali Mokdad of the institute, explaining that stricter policies would have been implemented. worldwide if there were no vaccines during the delta variant increase.
“While this time we did pretty well, we saved millions and millions of lives, we could have done better and we should have done better in the future,” said Adam Finn of Bristol Medical School in England. who did not participate in the findings published Thursday. .
With AP cables