Excess mortality during COVID-19

Excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic

Preprint: Karlinsky & Kobak 2021, The World Mortality Dataset: Tracking excess mortality across countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.27.21250604v1

Analysis code: all-countries.ipynb (can be run in Colab).

The data are sourced from the World Mortality Dataset. Excess mortality is computed relative to the baseline obtained using linear extrapolation of the 2015–19 trend. In the figure below, gray lines are 2015–19, black line is baseline for 2020, red line is 2020, purple line is 2021. Countries are sorted by the % increase over the baseline.

Red number: excess mortality starting from the first officially reported Covid-19 death. Gray number: excess mortality as a % of the annual baseline deaths. Black number: excess mortality per 100,000 population. Blue number: ratio to the daily reported Covid-19 deaths over the same period (sourced from JHU).

Top-10 countries in the World Mortality Dataset according to different metrics (only countries with over 50,000 population are shown):

Compare with: FT, NYT, The Economist, WSJ.

Extrapolation until today

Daily reported Covid-19 mortality and estimated excess mortality across the countries with the most reported Covid-19 deaths. Note that in this figure the excess mortality in all countries is ESTIMATED using the undercount coefficient and the LATEST daily reported number of deaths. So this corresponds to the gray markers in the figure above.

Excess mortality in Russia

The code for my February 2021 paper in Significance Excess mortality reveals Covid’s true toll in Russia is available in the significance2021 folder, together with the frozen data and the final figures.

Figures below are updated every month. The up-to-date data can be found in the russian-data folder. Code: russia.ipynb

Some technical figures