fact finder
Status: 11/28/2022 1:25 p.m
In 2022, an unusually large number of people have died compared to previous years. October in particular was an outlier. According to experts, this cannot be explained by Corona alone.
According to projections by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), more than 90,000 people died in Germany in October of this year – 19 percent more than the median for the years 2018 to 2021. October is thus the high point of a development that can also be seen in the previous months: the high excess mortality in 2022.
Alexander Steininger
A development that even experts have not yet been able to clearly explain – and which thus opens the door to speculation. Among other things, the AfD member of the Bundestag Martin Sichert asked about a possible connection with the “Corona mass vaccinations”, in other Telegram channels the vaccinations have already been identified as the definitive cause. It is still much too early for clear statements, as experts emphasize.
“In the first years of the pandemic, we could be relatively certain that corona infections caused excess mortality,” says Sebastian Klüsener, research director at the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB). “It was a strong statistical signal sent by the corona waves in terms of mortality. Right now it’s much more difficult.”
Respiratory diseases as a cause?
The number of deaths in October could also be partly explained by the corona deaths – but not only. After all, according to the Robert Koch Institute, a total of 4334 people in Germany died of Corona in October, significantly more than in previous years (2021: 2493; 2020: 1482). Even in the summer months, when there was also excess mortality, significantly more people died of Corona this year than in previous years.
However, the increase in corona deaths alone is not sufficient to explain the high numbers for October, says Jonas Schöley, research associate in the working group Health Status of the Population at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock. “The corona deaths only explain about half of what we saw in October.” There are several possible reasons for the other half.
“I think the most obvious explanation is that we’re seeing a relatively early wave of infectious diseases this year,” says Schöley. Because unlike in the past, there was already a high number of respiratory diseases such as the flu in October. “What we are seeing are two synchronous developments: on the one hand, the corona deaths, which increased from early autumn to October. On the other hand, respiratory infections, which also rose sharply.”
However, Schöley points out that the number of deaths can only be used to establish associations, not causal relationships. Ultimately, only the treating physicians could determine the true cause of death. “To me, however, that’s an obvious connection because it’s what we saw before the pandemic. If we saw excess mortality in winter before Corona, then we attributed it mainly to infectious diseases.” It is unusual that the wave of infectious diseases came so early.
Excess mortality in summer raises questions
Research Director Klüsener from the BiB sees it this way: “It used to be that we clearly recorded the highest mortality in winter. Flu waves caused strong fluctuations. “Sometimes the number of deaths in February was relatively low because no strong flu wave had broken out. And sometimes they were very high in February because there was a strong flu epidemic.”
High death rates are usually followed by lower ones in the months that follow, says Klüsener. Because mortality events, such as an influenza epidemic, ensure that health-prone people in particular die more often. As a result, the number of deaths then usually falls again, since there are initially fewer health-prone people than before the event.
However, the seasonality of mortality has changed. “What we are seeing more and more now is that other months also have a high mortality rate,” says Klüsener. For example, more people died in the summer months than in previous years. This would make it more difficult to forecast expected deaths because the seasonal patterns would shift.
“Summer is more unclear to me than October”
“The summer is more unclear to me than what happened in October,” says Schöley. Some of this can be explained by heat waves: “Heat and excess mortality correlate very, very clearly.” Another part could be explained by the corona deaths. But that together is not enough. “It is not implausible to assume that we might see the indirect effects of the pandemic a little more clearly.”
Schöley means, among other things, that the health system may be overburdened as a result of the stressful pandemic period. However, that is all speculative.
Schöley, on the other hand, considers a correlation between the corona vaccination and excess mortality to be almost impossible. “As a scientist, I want to keep my options open, but I just don’t see a connection.” In addition, the scientific evidence in the evaluation of vaccines is significantly stronger than in population research. “Due to the very good study situation on the effectiveness and risks of the vaccination, we are not dependent on the error-prone search for causes in population data.” If the vaccines lead to an increased number of deaths, this has long been proven in medical and epidemiological research.
According to the experts, more reliable information on the background to the number of deaths can only be made when the causes of death are known. However, this data is only available with a delay of a few months. According to the experts, only then can it be explained how excess mortality could have occurred in a specific month. “It would be very helpful for factual debates without conspiracy theories if this data were available earlier. Then we could quickly provide well-founded explanations for current mortality trends,” says Klüsener.
How do the numbers come about?
The fact that excess mortality in Germany is reported by Destatis for the individual weeks and months has only been the case since the corona pandemic. Destatis draws on the death reports from the registry offices, says Felix zur Nieden, an expert in death numbers and demography at Destatis.
For the over- or under-mortality statistics, the next step is to compare the absolute number of deaths in a month with the median of the four previous years for the month. If the value is above the median, there is excess mortality; if it is below, it is below mortality.
What is the median?
The median is the value that is right in the middle of a data series sorted by size. It is also called the central value because there is as much data below it as above it. It has the advantage that the influence of individual extreme outliers on a statistic is reduced. The median should not be confused with the arithmetic mean, which is simply the average of all data.
According to zur Nieden, the period from the four previous years was chosen in order to take into account the different extent of seasonally recurring events such as flu or heat waves. However, the longer the comparison period goes back, the greater the influence of other factors such as aging or the increase in life expectancy on the development of the number of deaths. “The four years are a compromise in order to balance various factors as much as possible,” says zur Nieden.