COVID Has Killed 15 Million People Worldwide, WHO Says

The problem is that 85 of the 194 countries surveyed by the WHO technical advisory group that came up with the new estimates don’t have good enough death registries for this to be a viable approach. Forty-one of those countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.

For these countries, a team led by Jonathan Wakefield, a statistician at the University of Washington in Seattle, used the data from countries with complete death registries to build another statistical model able to predict total COVID deaths in any month from other measures, including temperature , the percentage of COVID tests returning positive, a rating of the stringency of social distancing and other measures to limit infection, and rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease — conditions that put people at high risk of dying from COVID.

The Indian health ministry objected strongly to this model in its response to the New York Times article. But the WHO team didn’t actually use it to estimate Indian COVID deaths. India falls into an intermediate group of countries that have reasonably good data on total deaths in some regions but not in others. So Wakefield’s team used data from 17 Indian states with adequate death registries, applied the standard excess deaths approach used for countries with complete death registries, and then extrapolated from these states to the entire country.

“We only base the predictions of how many people died in India in those two years on Indian data,” Wakefield told BuzzFeed News.

Importantly, the WHO’s estimates for Indian

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People Across The Globe Marched In Solidarity With Demonstrators In Iran

Thousands of people across the globe on Saturday marched in solidarity with the anti-government demonstrations in Iran as violent police crackdowns have continued against people who speak out against Iran’s mandatory hijab laws.

In Berlin, police estimated that about 37,000 people had joined the German demonstration on Saturday afternoon. In Washington, DC, hundreds marched on the National Mall waving Iranian flags, chanting, “Be scared. Be scared. We are one in this.” Several universities in Tehran staged more demonstrations on Sunday.

The outcry was sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman who died on Sept. 16 while in custody of Iran’s morality police. She was arrested for wearing tight pants and “improperly” wearing her hijab. Her family later spoke out, saying they believed she was tortured and killed.

Protests spread in Iran, with many calling for a downfall of the conservative regime — and international voices joined in quickly to criticize Iran’s theocratic rule and brutal suppression of protesters. President Joe Biden condemned Iran’s actions earlier this month.

From Tokyo to London and Sydney, here are some of the images that captured the marches this weekend:

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Ukrainians Say Russian Enemy Troops Are Moving Into Their Abandoned Homes

A brief reprieve came in the early afternoon, when the Ukrainians went on the offensive.

“We’re hitting them because they’ve run out of artillery shells,” Anatoli, a 19-year-old Ukrainian soldier, told BuzzFeed News. “We can say that Irpin is theirs. But we will cut them off now that the people are out.”

Kyiv has tried to agree with Moscow on safe evacuation routes out of cities encircled by Russian forces where shelling is heaviest. But the agreements largely haven’t stuck, and civilians have been deliberately targeted by the Russian military as they try to flee.

There has been no agreement between the warring sides for a safe corridor out of Irpin, which is in northern Ukraine near the capital of Kyiv.

Until Sunday, residents were able to leave the town by train. But then the Russians bombed the tracks, destroying the safest and easiest escape route. On Tuesday, the only way out was through the rubble of a bridge blown up by the Ukrainian army to stop Russian forces from advancing with tanks and armored vehicles into Kyiv just 15 miles to the east.

Ukrainian soldiers were told BuzzFeed News that thousands of residents were being urged to leave immediately because Russian forces were not only pulverizing Irpin but were also moving in — stealing food, gas, and other supplies — and occupying whatever is left of it.

Anna, a woman in her 60s, told BuzzFeed News that if it weren’t for enemy soldiers breaking into her family’s home, “we

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