Tracking excess mortality across countries during the COVID-19 pandemic with the World Mortality Dataset
- Hebrew University, Israel
- University of Tübingen, Germany
Abstract
Comparing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic between countries or across time is difficult because the reported numbers of cases and deaths can be strongly affected by testing capacity and reporting policy. Excess mortality, defined as the increase in all-cause mortality relative to the expected mortality, is widely considered as a more objective indicator of the COVID-19 death toll. However, there has been no global, frequently-updated repository of the all-cause mortality data across countries. To fill this gap, we have collected weekly, monthly, or quarterly all-cause mortality data from 94 countries and territories, openly available as the regularly-updated World Mortality Dataset. We used this dataset to compute the excess mortality in each country during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that in several worst-affected countries (Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico) the excess mortality was above 50% of the expected annual mortality. At the same time, in several other countries (Australia, New Zealand) mortality during the pandemic was below the usual level, presumably due to social distancing measures decreasing the non-COVID infectious mortality. Furthermore, we found that while many countries have been reporting the COVID-19 deaths very accurately, some countries have been substantially underreporting their COVID-19 deaths (e.g. Nicaragua, Russia, Uzbekistan), sometimes by two orders of magnitude (Tajikistan). Our results highlight the importance of open and rapid all-cause mortality reporting for pandemic monitoring.
Data availability
Full data is publicly available at: https://github.com/akarlinsky/world_mortality
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
DK was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (BE5601/4-1 and the Cluster of Excellence ``Machine Learning --- New Perspectives for Science', EXC 2064, project number 390727645), the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (FKZ 01GQ1601 and 01IS18039A) and the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number U19MH114830. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Copyright
© 2021, Karlinsky & Kobak
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Tracking excess mortality across countries during the COVID-19 pandemic with the World Mortality Dataset
eLife 10:e69336.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.69336
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