A new study, based in part on The Economist’s estimates of the pandemic’s true death toll, attempts to model just how many lives have been spared since vaccines became widely available to the public
, attempts to model just how many lives have been spared since vaccines became widely available to the public. —found that in the first year of vaccine rollout, jabs saved the lives of 19.1m-20.4m people. Without vaccines, the study estimates, roughly three times as many people would have died from covid in 2021 alone. And 6.8m-7.7m of the prevented deaths were in countries covered byStill, a lack of vaccinesstill led to avoidable deaths.
To arrive at these estimates the researchers, Oliver J. Watson, Gregory Barnsley and their colleagues at Imperial College London, began with an existing transmission model used to track the spread of covid infections. They then combined this model with’s estimate of the pandemic’s true death toll to estimate how deadly the pandemic would have been without vaccines.
The study has its limitations. It relies on assumptions about the share of estimated infections that led to death, for instance., which has limited reliable data, was excluded from the analysis, as were very small countries. That means the total number of actual averted deaths will be even higher. On the other hand, the researchers did not attempt to model how people or governments might have changed their behaviour to limit infections in the absence of vaccines.