Global data strongly indicate that direct COVID-19 deaths far exceed deaths attributable to the pandemic’s second- and third‑order economic and social effects. Estimates that account for under‑reporting and excess mortality place the total number of deaths caused by the COVID‑19 pandemic (overwhelmingly from infection itself) in the tens of millions: by early 2023, analyses compiled by WHO and others suggested roughly 19–36 million total COVID-related deaths worldwide, compared with about 7 million officially reported, with WHO and subsequent methodological reviews explicitly noting that most of the gap between reported deaths and excess mortality is due to uncounted direct COVID infections, not indirect effects. (en.wikipedia.org) Detailed decompositions in high‑quality data settings point the same way. For the United States from March 2020 to April 2021, one study attributed about 90% of 666,000 excess deaths directly to SARS‑CoV‑2 infection, with only about 10% arising indirectly (mainly increased external‑cause deaths such as overdoses and injuries). (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) Another national analysis of 2020–21 multiple‑cause mortality found widespread excess deaths from non‑COVID causes (diabetes, kidney disease, hypertensive heart disease, etc.), but still concluded that COVID‑labelled deaths accounted for roughly 70–75% of excess mortality, with much of the remainder likely including under‑recognized COVID rather than purely economic or social sequelae. (link.springer.com) Estimates of clearly indirect deaths from health‑system disruption and broader fallout, while substantial in absolute terms, are comparatively small. For example, WHO’s malaria program attributes about 63,000 additional malaria deaths in 2020–21 to COVID‑related service disruptions, (who.int) and TB modelling and surveillance suggest on the order of hundreds of thousands of extra tuberculosis deaths globally between 2020 and 2022 compared with the pre‑pandemic trajectory, not millions per year. (who.int) Early modelling of maternal and child health disruptions in low‑ and middle‑income countries projected up to roughly 1–1.2 million additional under‑5 deaths and tens of thousands of additional maternal deaths in extreme scenarios, but these were hypothetical upper bounds and still well below the scale of direct COVID mortality. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) Taken together, the best available evidence suggests that indirect deaths from economic and social effects of the pandemic number in the low single‑digit millions at most, while direct COVID infection has killed many tens of millions. That makes Chamath’s qualitative claim—that more people would die from second‑ and third‑order effects than from the virus itself—unsupported by current data and therefore wrong.