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According to an evaluation in the first two years of the corona pandemic in 2020 and 2021, the excess mortality worldwide was significantly higher than the officially reported Covid 19 death figures.
The discrepancy was particularly large in middle-income countries, as reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the journal »Nature«.
According to this, around 14.83 million more people died worldwide in the two years than would have been expected without the pandemic.
The WHO had already reported almost 15 million additional deaths in May.
At that time, the sometimes very complex methodology of the WHO was criticized.
The procedure is quite flexible, but also easily influenced by short-term random fluctuations, it said.
This led to inaccuracies in Germany, for example: in 2018 there were an unusually large number of deaths in this country due to a strong flu epidemic, but in 2019 the value was rather low.
The criticism at the time was that the WHO procedure did not take this into account sufficiently.
This resulted in implausible estimates of excess mortality for the years that followed.
The WHO reacted quickly at the time and has now refined the analysis for publication in »Nature«.
Many states with weak data
The new estimate is almost three times the number of officially reported 5.4 million Covid-19 deaths during that period.
However, due to the weak data situation, it is not possible for almost half of all countries to state excess mortality with a high level of certainty.
The number now published also includes deaths where the cause of death was probably not stated correctly: those of presumably infected but untested patients and deaths of people with illnesses or injuries who could not be treated in time due to the overload of the health systems .
For Germany, the WHO data analysis team recalculated the original estimate and concluded that there was an excess mortality of 122,000 - rather than 195,000 - over the two years.
A study by the University of Duisburg-Essen also took demographic developments into account for 2020 and came to the conclusion that some of the additional deaths were due to the growing number of people over 80.
So much for the recent past.
For weeks, Germany has also been discussing the currently high excess mortality: According to the Federal Statistical Office, in October alone this was 19 percent above the average value of previous years - in human lives: 15,000.
The statisticians do not believe that the high excess mortality can be explained solely by the Covid 19 deaths.
Although the Covid deaths also reached an interim maximum in mid-October, they could only partially explain the difference.
“It is currently not possible to assess the extent to which other factors contributed to the increased numbers in October.
The results of the cause of death statistics, which will be available later, can provide additional information on this question," it said.
The cause of death statistics for 2022 are not expected until the end of next year.
Vaccination has nothing to do with excess mortality
Of course, there is already speculation about the reasons, for example on social media: rumors are being circulated there that the vaccinations could be to blame for the high number of deaths.
From a scientific point of view, these claims are not tenable.
In fact, the opposite is true: Vaccinations prevented almost 20 million deaths in the first year alone.
Jonas Schöley, research associate in the Population Health Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, also considers a correlation between the corona vaccination and excess mortality to be almost impossible: "As a scientist, I want to keep all options open, but I just don't see any connection ' Schöley said recently to the 'Tagesschau'.
In addition, the scientific evidence in the evaluation of vaccines is significantly stronger than in population research.
"Due to the very good study situation on the effectiveness and risks of the vaccination, we are not dependent on the error-prone search for causes in population data." If the vaccines led to an increased number of deaths, this would have been proven long ago in medical and epidemiological research.
Rather, experts suspect that the high excess mortality is associated with the wave of other infectious diseases, which started particularly early this year.
Indirect effects of the pandemic could also be responsible for the high mortality, such as the generally overburdened health system and the lack of staff in clinics.
collateral damage of the pandemic
In its current analysis, the WHO also suspects that the high excess mortality could be related to the collateral damage of the pandemic: »In addition to what can be directly attributed to Covid-19, the pandemic has also caused extensive collateral damage, which has led to significant losses of livelihoods and people have led human lives,” writes the organization there.
The high excess mortality in the summer months is also attributed to the heat wave: Older people in particular died during this time as a result of the unusually high temperatures.
Another reason for the death toll could be surgeries postponed during pandemic peaks.
In any case, the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" speculates in a corresponding data analysis that tumors may have been discovered too late because many did not go to check-ups or went too late for fear of being infected with Covid-19.
Some surgical interventions - for example for breast or colon cancer - have also fallen since the beginning of the pandemic.
According to the WHO study, middle-income countries in South America were particularly affected by high excess mortality.
Peru therefore had almost twice as many deaths as would have been expected.
In Mexico, Bolivia and Ecuador the number was 50 percent higher.
In poorer countries, excess mortality was not as high because the population there is usually younger and therefore fewer people died of Covid-19, the analysis says.
In their analysis, the WHO authors themselves address weaknesses in their estimate.
In addition, Enrique Acosta from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) emphasizes in a comment in "Nature" that the numbers should be viewed with caution: Because only 37 percent of the countries had monthly statistics with all deaths.
43 percent of the countries did not present any figures at all.
The statisticians therefore had to make assumptions that Acosta believes are sometimes problematic.
Hanno Ulmer, Director of the Medical Statistics and Informatics Section at the Medical University of Innsbruck, said of the estimate: “The WHO’s desire to be able to classify the Covid 19 pandemic with a few numbers on excess mortality is understandable.” And further: "It also seems necessary to examine the situation in the individual countries separately so that the excess mortality from Covid-19 can be correctly estimated." He would not necessarily see the work as an estimate of the Covid-19 deaths, but as a work on Excess mortality in the pandemic years 2020 and 2021. "A small but subtle difference that can vary greatly depending on the country and region."
kry/dpa