Millions of people have died from Covid-19 around the world in the past two years. Most of them could have lived many more years without the disease. However, the official statistics do not show exactly how many lives the pandemic has claimed in total. Because many countries record their Covid-19 deceased only incompletely, while others do not distinguish whether Covid-19 was really the cause of death. It is also not possible to compare which state has chosen the best strategy to combat the pandemic.
However, the weakness of the corona statistics can be compensated for with a little mathematics. Because regardless of the cause of death, there are figures from all over the world on how many people have died in recent years. In Germany, for example, a good one million people died in 2021, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), almost 57 million worldwide. These values change over the years, for example because the average age of Germans continues to rise.
In order to check whether an unusually large number of people died during the pandemic, i.e. whether there was excess mortality, one has to estimate how many deaths there would have been in a normal year. So in a year without a deadly pandemic and without lockdowns. If you compare the past two years with the long-term average, you can see a clear excess mortality. The WHO has in one recently published analysis calculated that almost 15 million more people died in 2020 and 2021 than they would have expected based on developments in previous years.
These values are of the same order of magnitude as calculations of economist (between 12 and 21 million additional deaths) and results of a recently published study on excess mortality in the journal The Lancet (17 to 20 million).
For Germany, however, the WHO statisticians made a massive miscalculation: according to the World Health Organization, there were 200,000 more deaths than expected. In view of the generally prevailing narratives that Germany has made it through the pandemic so far reasonably well, this huge number is surprising. Especially since the Federal Statistical Office comes up with completely different numbers: For 2020 and 2021 All in all, it speaks of an excess mortality of about 74,000 more deaths than would have been expected in the long-term average. The outcry among statisticians was correspondingly greatwhen the WHO analysis appeared.
A look at the WHO estimates quickly reveals the error: the World Health Organization significantly underestimated the deaths to be expected without a pandemic. One of the authors, University of Washington statistician Jon Wakefield, explained this to the BBC So: In 2019 the observed number of deaths in Germany was surprisingly low, fewer people died than in previous years. The regression model used in the analysis, a statistical method to derive developments from individual data points, reacted too sensitively to this low mortality. As a result, the estimate of mortality without a pandemic was too low. “This, in turn, has led to a higher estimate of excess mortality than we think is realistic.”
Therefore, there should soon be a new, corrected analysis by the WHO. This should then also correct the excess mortality in Sweden. There, the World Health Organization had significantly underestimated the deaths caused by the pandemic.