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Excess mortality was low from March 2021 onwards, as a rapid vaccination campaign allowed the country to open up again.
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States elsewhere locked down quickly enough to prevent major outbreaks at that point, but a second wave in November and December surged through most of the country. In March 2020 America’s east coast was hit hard by the pandemic. The lines on each chart represent excess deaths, and the shaded area represents the number of fatalities officially attributed to coronavirus by the government. Though most of those victims have been older than 65, the number of deaths among Europeans aged 45-64 was 40% higher than usual in early April 2020.īelow are a set of charts that compare the number of excess deaths and official covid-19 deaths over time in each country. These figures show that, compared with a historical baseline of the previous five years, Europe has suffered some deadly flu seasons since 2016-but that the death toll from covid-19 has been far greater. The chart below uses data from EuroMOMO, a network of epidemiologists who collect weekly reports on deaths from all causes in 23 European countries. Our sources also include the Human Mortality Database, a collaboration between UC Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and the World Mortality Dataset, created by Ariel Karlinsky and Dmitry Kobak.
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The full data for each country, as well as our underlying code, can be downloaded from our GitHub repository. The table below shows that, in most places, the number of excess deaths (compared with our baseline) is greater than the number of covid-19 fatalities officially recorded by the government. Many Western countries, and some nations and regions elsewhere, regularly publish data on mortality from all causes. We have used statistical models to create our baselines, by predicting the number of deaths each region would normally have recorded in 20. One way to account for these methodological problems is to use a simpler measure, known as “excess deaths”: take the number of people who die from any cause in a given region and period, and then compare it with a historical baseline from recent years. And third, the pandemic has made it harder for doctors to treat other conditions and discouraged people from going to hospital, which may have indirectly caused an increase in fatalities from diseases other than covid-19. Second, hospitals and civil registries may not process death certificates for several days, or even weeks, which creates lags in the data. First, the official statistics in many countries exclude victims who did not test positive for coronavirus before dying-which can be a substantial majority in places with little capacity for testing. Unfortunately, the total number of fatalities caused by the pandemic may be even higher, for several reasons. A S COVID-19 has spread around the world, people have become grimly familiar with the death tolls that their governments publish each day.
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