IHME in the news

Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health at the University of Washington, said it’s still too early to predict what XBB.1.16 will do. But what he’s seen so far has been reassuring. “We haven’t seen an increase in hospitalizations, we haven’t seen an increase in any of the indicators that make us worry,” Mokdad said.

“I think eventually we’ll find out,” says Chris Murray, now the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “But it is remarkable how much uncertainty there is on a subject that’s actually quite important.”

En marzo del 2022, un informe de la Organización Mundial de la Salud, OMS, basado en una revisión de las repercusiones de la pandemia en la salud mental, y en estimaciones del último estudio de Global Burden of Disease, concluyó que la pandemia desencadenó un aumento del 26 % y un incremento del 28 % de la ansiedad y los trastornos depresivos graves en el mundo y que la población joven corre un riesgo desproporcionado de comportamientos suicidas y autolesivos.

The Global Burden of Disease Study in 2019 noted that non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are responsible for 63% of deaths in India.  Apart from the health impact, NCDs also lead to immense financial loss.  

"We can invest in programs that protect the communities that we see disproportionately affected by the pandemic," said co-lead author Emma Castro, a researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, in the video commentary.  

Researchers from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington have mapped out some scenarios that weigh vaccine uptake, fading protection and antiviral use, among other factors, to project what we can expect across the globe through the end of June.

Despite these limitations, three independent analyses of excess mortality—by the World Health Organization, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and the Economist—reach similar conclusions. In the first three years of the pandemic, more than 20 million excess deaths occurred globally.

"We did not see a wave because we had a very high immunity due to infections and vaccinations," Dr. Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist with the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, told ABC News. "Omicron and its subvariants did not spare anyone. Also, many of the infections were minor and not reported or did not end in a hospitalization."

In India, as per the Global Burden of Disease estimates 2016, NCDs contributed to the 62% of the deaths and 55% of the disability-adjusted life years, posing a huge burden.

The rate in the US is eight times greater than in Canada, which has the seventh highest rate of gun ownership in the world; 22 times higher than in the European Union and 23 times greater than in Australia, according to Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation data from 2019.

According to the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, in the first two years of the pandemic women were twice as likely as men to develop long COVID, and 15% of all of those affected at three months continued to experience symptoms beyond 12 months.

Globally, low back pain is a leading cause of years lived with disability, with neck pain coming in at No. 4, according to the 2016 Global Burden of Disease Study.

“Omicron has been able to evade past immunity and infect you, but fortunately not necessarily cause severe disease and death,” said Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

In Europe, the combined number of police killings and state executions remains in the single digits each year in many countries, according to data from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). The US’s annual rate of police killings and state executions, with more than 1,000 deaths a year, is more comparable to Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Cameroon, Libya and Sudan, according to IHME data.

“Hopkins filled a gap that nobody else was able to do,” Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at University of Washington’s IHME. “So all of us, reporters, us in academia, we went to Hopkins to get the data.”