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Candles in front of the Frauenkirche in Dresden remind of the around 1500 deaths of the corona pandemic in the Saxon state capital on Saturday
Photo: Robert Michael / dpa
For the first time since the Federal Republic of Germany came into existence, there were more than a million deaths within a year in 2021.
Last year, a total of around 1.02 million deaths were registered in Germany, as the Federal Statistical Office announced on Tuesday in Wiesbaden, citing the first preliminary results.
The reason for this is likely to be the aging of the population and the consequences of the corona pandemic.
There were more than a million deaths within a year in what is now the Federal Republic of Germany in the post-war period only in 1946 - at that time around 1,001,600 deaths were registered.
While difficult living conditions at the time explained the high number of deaths, according to the statistics office, the numbers today are mainly due to the larger population and the higher proportion of older people.
Specifically, 1,016,899 people died last year.
Compared to the first Corona year 2020, the number of deaths rose by 31,327 or 3 percent.
The aging of the population only partially explains this further increase, because the overall increase in life expectancy weakens the aging effect.
Before the pandemic, the number of deaths rose annually by an average of 1 to 2 percent.
This changed with the corona crisis.
In 2020, the number of deaths rose by 5 percent compared to 2019 before the pandemic and by 8 percent in 2021 compared to 2019.
More than 100,000 deaths in December
Even the officially reported corona deaths can only explain the new numbers to a small extent. The excess mortality compared to the four previous years - including the year 2020, which was already marked by Corona - the statisticians put at 69,702, an increase of 7 percent compared to the average of previous years. At the end of the year, the numbers in the fourth wave of infections rose particularly sharply, although in December with 100,291 deaths, it was not quite as strong as in the comparable month of 2020.
In Germany as well as in neighboring countries, the statisticians determined a moderate to high excess mortality in the December weeks according to the standards of the European network Euromomo, in the Netherlands a very high one.
According to statisticians, it is not yet possible to quantify exactly which effects they explain.
In addition to the unreported number of undetected corona deaths, they also named the consequences of postponed operations or deaths from other infectious diseases such as flu, which, in contrast to previous years, hardly occurred in 2020, but could now appear as recuperated mortality, as possible effects of the pandemic.
ak / AFP
