It is still too early to assess the exact death toll due to the Covid-19 epidemic in France, in particular because of the uncertainties about deaths occurring at home, Public Health France warns on Wednesday. "The number of deaths directly associated with the Covid-19 epidemic cannot be determined precisely at this stage" , concludes the health agency in a study on the surveillance of mortality in France between March 2 and May 31 .
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During this period, 18,861 deaths in hospitals and 10,335 deaths in nursing homes and social medical establishments were officially counted as linked to the coronavirus, a total of 29,186 (the figure has since exceeded 30,000). But Public Health France emphasizes that this assessment "is likely to be overestimated" because some deaths counted in nursing homes were "suspected of Covid-19". "In the absence of systematic PCR tests, some declared deaths were probably wrongly associated" with Covid-19, the study considers.
Its authors also analyzed all-cause mortality figures from civil registry offices to estimate “excess mortality” attributable to the epidemic during these three months. “Between March 2 and May 31, 2020, a little more than 175,800 deaths from all causes were estimated on the national territory. This number is 25,030 "higher than the expected number of deaths, estimated from observations of previous years, they detail. Problem: the estimate of the expected number of deaths is also difficult to establish, warn the researchers, because the "epidemic period produced several simultaneous effects" on mortality, difficult to quantify.
To the increase in mortality directly linked to the epidemic has in fact been added an increase resulting from "delays in medical care" , "to the anxiety-provoking context of the health and economic consequences of the epidemic, or to isolation. frail and elderly people ”. But this period also resulted in a drop in mortality due to the reduction in travel and activities during confinement (road accidents, occupational accidents, etc.) “Only exhaustive data on the medical causes of death, collected from all death certificates, electronic and paper, will make it possible to precisely quantify the excess mortality associated with the epidemic " , estimates Public Health France, specifying that the collection and processing of paper death certificates " require several months ” and that they “ cannot be analyzed before the end of 2020 ”. This observation pleads for "the urgency to generalize the use of electronic certification of deaths" , "available in a reactive way", claims the health agency. This certification method "was only used at the start of 2020 for 20% of national mortality, with strong regional heterogeneity" , she explains.
