Covid-19 was the number three cause of death in Bavaria last year. Almost 7,600 people succumbed to the disease, the State Statistics Office announced on Wednesday. Only chronic ischemic heart disease with 10,800 deaths and dementia with almost 8,000 were more common. If the effects of aging in society are taken into account, Covid-19 was even just in second place.
A total of 152,417 people died in Bavaria last year. That was 4,433 more than in 2021. Compared to the pre-Corona level in 2019, the increase is 18,104 or 14 percent. Statisticians explain a good third of the additional deaths compared to 2019 with the fact that Bavaria’s population is growing and getting older. But 11,700 they attribute to a change in mortality.
The age-standardized death rates per 100,000 inhabitants, which are not influenced by aging and population growth and therefore allow a long-term comparison, have increased for the third year in a row. Before that, they had been falling largely continuously since at least 2000. According to the state office, no age-standardized data is yet available for the current year.
Another option is to compare the number of deaths with the mean (median) of the four previous years. In 2022 and until March 2023, there are values that are clearly above the median of the previous year’s months. From April this will no longer be the case. But this does not mean an all-clear, the state office said. “We are not yet at the pre-Corona level when it comes to mortality. However, there has been no further increase recently.”
The fact that the death numbers from April to July of this year are no longer above the median for the respective months of the previous year can at least partly be due to a simple base effect: the median of four values is calculated by taking the average of the second and third largest values . Since spring, only one of the four comparison months dates back to the pre-Corona period, which may push the median higher.