The number caused a stir and a lot of criticism: In Germany, almost 200,000 more people died in 2020 and 2021 than would have been expected without the corona pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported at the beginning of May. The pandemic would have claimed about twice as many lives as were officially recorded in Germany. But the WHO had miscalculated. Now she is presenting new figures – and like the magazine Nature reportedshe corrects her information on excess mortality in Germany significantly downwards.
The excess mortality in 2020 and 2021 was around 122,000 cases, 37 percent lower than initially stated. According to the original estimate, the annual death rate for the two years of the pandemic in Germany was 116 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. In the new estimate, the statisticians only put this death rate at 72.7.
With their new estimate, the WHO of those excess mortality that the economist calculated for Germany (around 122,000 dead, but from 2020 to May 2022). However, the number determined by the WHO is still higher than the calculations of the Federal Statistical Office. This had for 2020 and 2021 an excess mortality of about 75,000 cases was determined.
The exact number of Covid deaths worldwide cannot be recorded precisely because official figures are not always and everywhere reliably collected. In its analysis for a total of 194 countries, the WHO therefore compared the total number of deaths with the number of deaths that would have been expected based on developments in recent years without a pandemic. The WHO experts had come to the conclusion that there was an excess mortality of between 13.3 million and 16.6 million deaths worldwide, more than two and a half times as many as were officially recorded.
The WHO is also correcting the estimated number of corona deaths for Sweden – upwards
However, the WHO used a method for its estimate that is easily irritated by short-term fluctuations. For example, the statistical model derived from a small decrease in mortality in Germany in 2019 that the number of deaths would also have decreased in 2020 and 2021 without a pandemic. In fact, the number of deaths in Germany has been increasing for years because German society is getting older. In addition, the WHO apparently adjusted death data from the German authorities upwards due to alleged incompleteness. For both reasons, the WHO came up with a result that was too high for excess mortality in Germany.
For similar reasons, the WHO has also misjudged other countries, such as in the case of Sweden. For the Scandinavian country, which is often cited as a role model by critics of the German corona measures because of its less restrictive course, the WHO model initially came up with an excess mortality rate that was too low. The statisticians of the WHO have now corrected this by 19 percent upwards. According to the new estimate, the death rate in Sweden was 66.1 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per year. The fatality rate had previously been estimated at 55.8.
The WHO announced that it would generally review the models and calculations. The statistician Jon Wakefield from the University of Washington admitted in the conversation Nature Errors and said: “We are very transparent and are ready to take up reasonable criticism.”