Egypt ranks 5th worldwide in underreporting COVID-19 deaths according to World Bank report

Egypt ranks among the top countries in the world to underreport the number of deaths related to COVID-19, according to research cited in a recent report by the World Bank.

The research, which examines the death rates over the first year of the pandemic in 103 countries, uses a metric called the undercount ratio to compare excess mortality — the number of deaths in a country from all causes above the expected number of deaths over a specific period — to officially reported COVID-19 deaths. Excess mortality is widely considered an objective indicator of the deaths caused by pandemics and other extreme events. A high undercount ratio implies that unknown and unreported COVID-19 deaths were missed in the official count.

According to the World Bank report, which focuses on socio-economic trends and public health systems in the Middle East and North Africa, Egypt’s ratio of excess mortality to reported COVID-19 deaths stood at 13.1 as of November 30, 2020, by far the highest undercount ratio in the Middle East and North Africa, and the fifth highest in the world.

Source: World Bank

While the World Bank report does not provide the statistical data behind the calculation, official government numbers related to the coronavirus pandemic in Egypt have long been called into question. Last year, a member of the Cabinet’s coronavirus committee estimated that the actual number of COVID-19 infections in the country was ten times higher than the official government toll. 

Egypt’s reporting policies on the pandemic have also created statistical aberrations. For example, Egypt has exhibited one of the highest coronavirus death rates — the number of official COVID-19 deaths compared to the number of recorded cases — in the world. As Mada Masr reported last year, the discrepancy was a result of limited testing policies and due to any positive cases recorded outside of the Health Ministry’s Central Labs being excluded from the official count, resulting in a large number of cases going unaccounted for.

The number of new cases and deaths recorded daily in Egypt has increased steadily since mid-August, with officials saying that Egypt is currently in its fourth wave of the pandemic. According to the latest official figures, a total of 311,576 have contracted COVID-19 in Egypt over the course of the pandemic and 17,658 have died.

Though Egypt’s Health Ministry announced an ambitious target to vaccinate 70 percent of the country’s 100-million strong population before the end of 2021, the ministry announced last week that only seven million people have received both doses of the vaccine so far, while 13 million have had at least one shot.