Deaths in 2021: What is the effect of Corona?

Created: 01/11/2022, 4:30 PM

Over a million people died in Germany in 2021.

© Sven Hoppe / dpa

How many lives the corona pandemic cost is not easy to answer.

Other factors are also responsible for the record high of one million deaths in 2021.

Wiesbaden - For the first time since the Second World War, more than a million people died in Germany in a year.

Anyone who only thinks of Corona with this record is wrong: Other causes played a greater role in 2021.

Nevertheless, the effect of the pandemic cannot be discussed away, as experts emphasize.

It's not just Corona

According to a projection by the Federal Statistical Office, 1.017 million people died last year.

Only in 1946 there had been over a million deaths in what is now the Federal Republic of Germany.

"While difficult living conditions at the time explained the high number of deaths, today the numbers are in this order of magnitude mainly due to the larger population and the higher proportion of older people," said the statisticians in Wiesbaden on Tuesday.

Because there are more and more old people, the number of deaths has been rising annually for about 20 years, on average by one to two percent.

At the same time, life expectancy is also growing - at least until the start of the corona pandemic.

"The effect of increasing life expectancy weakened the aging effect," explains the team for demographic analyzes.

That changed with Corona: In 2020, the increase was stronger than expected compared to the last pre-pandemic year 2019 - plus five percent.

“Based on 2019, a death rate of 960,000 to 980,000 would have been expected in 2021, an increase of two to four percent.

In fact, it rose by eight percent from 2019 to 2021, ”the statistics office stated.

Growth parallel to corona waves

It's worth taking a look at individual months.

In December 2021, 100,291 people died in Germany according to a special evaluation of the provisional death rate.

That was 22 percent more than the average for the December months of 2017 to 2020. In January 2021 - during the second Corona wave - the number of deaths was even 25 percent above the average.

Professor Tim Friede, head of the Institute for Medical Statistics at the University Medical Center Göttingen, clearly recognizes from the graphics that the fluctuations in the number of deaths run parallel to the waves of the corona pandemic.

"You can also see an increase over the pandemic years - and that is higher than can be explained by the aging of the population."

In February and March 2021, however, fewer people died than the average in previous years.

One cause: There were hardly any other respiratory diseases besides Covid-19.

The flu wave, which is otherwise always clearly reflected in the death rate, virtually stopped in 2021.

If you look at the graphics with flu waves, it becomes clear for Prof. Friede that in the two Corona years the peak values ​​for the weekly number of deaths were not higher than in years with strong flu waves.

High number of unreported cases

In April and May 2021, the numbers were again slightly above average.

"In June the increased deaths coincided with a heat wave," reported Destatis.

In July and August the numbers moved around the meridian again.

From September, however, the curve went up, in November with an increase of 21 percent.

According to the Federal Statistical Office, "the reported Covid-19 deaths only partially explain the increased number of deaths": The number of deaths rose more than the number of deaths reported to the Robert Koch Institute.

Dmitri Jdanov, Head of the Demographic Data Research Laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, sees two possible reasons for this.

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More people could have died as a result of a corona infection than the statistics show - because cardiovascular failure was given as the cause of death, for example.

The "dark figure" could be quite high.

“However, the number of indirect deaths is likely to be even higher,” estimates Jdanov: Operations have been postponed, preventive examinations have been missed - these cases must also be added to the pandemic.

dpa