How many people have died from COVID-19?

From The Medical Republic, 30 November 2020:

The COVID-19 pandemic has so far claimed more than 1.3 million lives, and those are just the deaths we know about.

Like the proverbial iceberg, the true scale of pandemic-related mortality is still hidden below the surface.

It’s the elderly woman who died of a heart attack because she was too afraid of COVID-19 to go to hospital. It’s the young father who died of an acute asthma exacerbation because there were no ambulances free to attend him. It’s the chronic kidney failure patient whose regular doctor was self-isolating with COVID-19. It’s the septicaemia missed because hospital staff were frantically running from one code blue to the next, as more and more patients were brought into the ED gasping for breath. It’s the woman murdered by her abusive partner because lockdowns took away her only chance to escape.

These deaths may not have occurred were it not for the physiological, societal, economic and institutional havoc that SARS-CoV-2 has wrought on humanity. Read more.