Past evidence on fertility responses to external shocks, including economic recessions and the outbreaks of infectious diseases, show that people often put their childbearing plans on hold in uncertain times. We study the most recent data on monthly birth trends to analyse the initial fertility responses to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research, based on new Short-Term Fertility Fluctuations (STFF) data series (https://www.humanfertility.org/cgi-bin/stff.php), embedded in the Human Fertility Database (HFD), shows the initial signs of the expected “birth recession”. Monthly number of births in many countries fell sharply between October 2020 and the most recent month observed, often bringing about a clear reversal of the previous trend. Across 17 countries with lower fluctuations in births, the number of births fell on average by 5.1% in November 2020, 6.5% in December 2020 and 8.9% in January 2021 when compared with the same month of the previous year. Spain sustained the sharpest drop in the number of births among the analysed countries, with the number of births plummeting by 20% in December 2020 and January 2021. The combined effect of rising mortality and falling birth rates is disrupting the balance of births and deaths in many countries, pushing natural population increase to record low levels in 2020 and 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed substantial coverage and quality gaps in existing international and national statistical monitoring systems. It is striking that obtaining timely, accurate, and comparable across countries data in order to adequately respond to unexpected epidemiological threats is very challenging. The most robust and reliable approach to quantify the mortality burden due to short-term risk factors is based on estimating weekly excess deaths. This approach is more reliable than monitoring deaths with COVID-19 diagnosis or calculating incidence or fatality rates affected by numerous problems such as testing coverage and comparability of diagnostic approaches. In response to the emerging data challenges, a new data resource on weekly mortality has been established. The Short-term Mortality Fluctuations (STMF, available at www.mortality.org) data series is the first international database providing open-access harmonized, uniform, and fully documented data on weekly all-cause mortality. The STMF online vizualisation tool provides an opportunity to perform a quick assessment of the excess weekly mortality in one or several countries by means of an interactive graphical interface.

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Past economic, health and policy shocks were associated with a downturn in fertility. We use monthly birth data collected by the Human Fertility Database (Short-Term Fertility Fluctuations data series) to analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on birth trends until April 2022 in 37 highly developed countries. We also present estimates of monthly total fertility rate adjusted for seasonality. Overall, the coronavirus pandemic did not bring a lasting “baby bust” in most of the analyzed countries. On balance, many countries experienced an improvement in their birth dynamics compared with the pre-pandemic period. This was especially the case in the Nordic countries, German-speaking countries and Western Europe, alongside New Zealand, Israel and Quebec. However, this summary picture hides distinct short-term shifts during the pandemic. The initial pandemic shock resulted in a fall in births in most countries, with the sharpest drop in January 2021. Next, birth rates showed a surprising short-term recovery in March 2021, linked with the conceptions after the end of the first wave of the pandemic. Most countries then reported stable or slightly increasing numbers of births in the subsequent months, especially in Autumn 2021. Yet another downturn in births and fertility rates occurred in January-April 2022.

Estimating excess mortality is challenging. The metric depends on the expected mortality level, which can differ based on given choices, such as the method and the time series length used to estimate the baseline. However, these choices are often arbitrary, and are not subject to any sensitivity analysis. We bring to light the importance of carefully choosing the inputs and methods used to estimate excess mortality. Drawing on data from 26 countries, we investigate how sensitive excess mortality is to the choice of the mortality index, the number of years included in the reference period, the method, and the time unit of the death series. We employ two mortality indices, three reference periods, two data time units, and four methods for estimating the baseline. We show that excess mortality estimates can vary substantially when these factors are changed, and that the largest variations stem from the choice of the mortality index and the method. We also find that the magnitude of the variation in excess mortality can change markedly within countries, resulting in different cross-country rankings. We conclude that the inputs and method used to estimate excess mortality should be chosen carefully based on the specific research question.