‘At least three million died from COVID-19 in 2020’ World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. A new WHO report indicates that there were over 3 million COVID-19 casualties in 2020. Copyright: MONUSCO Photos/Wikimedia Commons, (CC BY-SA 2.0). This image has been cropped. Speed read Earlier estimates placed deaths from the pandemic in 2020 at 1.8 million WHO calls for fair and equitable access to COVID-19 shots among countries Share this article: Republish We encourage you to republish this article online and in print, it’s free under our creative commons attribution license, but please follow some simple guidelines: You have to credit our authors.