On May 5th the World Health Organisation declared an end to the covid-19 public-health emergency. Based on official mortality counts, this looked tardy. By April 2022, average weekly death tolls had already fallen to the level of March 2020.

Such tallies exclude deaths caused by covid but not attributed to it, however. A better measure is excess mortality, the gap between the number of deaths from all causes and the amount pre-covid trends would imply. For countries that do not publish their total number of deaths, we have built a model to estimate the excess.

This statistic also suggests that covid is killing at a slower, steadier pace than in 2020-21. Yet endemic covid remains surprisingly deadly. Amid high uncertainty, our central estimate for the world’s current total mortality rate exceeds projections from 2019 by 5%, or 3m lives per year.

In the past year 16% of estimated excess deaths were officially attributed to covid, down from 37% in 2021. This gap has grown as deaths from covid have shifted from rich countries to poor ones. In 2020 the virus hit hardest in the rich world, where relatively old populations travel often and huddle indoors in cold weather. Such places also ramped up testing, raising the share of victims counted in official data.

But in 2021 wealthy states began to turn the tide. Because many of the vul