The demography of COVID-19 deaths database, a gateway to well-documented international data

Caporali, Arianna; García, Jenny; Couppié, Étienne; Poniakina, Svitlana; Barbiéri, Magali; Bonnet, Florian; Camarda, Carlo Giovanni; Cambois, Emmanuelle; Hourani, Iris; Korotkova, Daria; Meslé, France; Penina, Olga; Robine, Jean‐Marie; Sauerberg, Markus; Torres, Catalina

doi:10.1038/s41597-022-01191-y

Cited by 12 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 8 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…To assess the specific contribution of Covid-19 mortality and its dynamics, counterfactual numbers of US deaths involving Covid-19 are estimated for each calendar year, 2020 and 2021, and for three twelve-month periods in-between (ending in the first, second and third quarter of 2021 respectively). Because countries report deaths involving Covid-19 using different age groupings [ 13 ], the above approach to estimate all-cause excess deaths was modified to rest instead on estimating a population-weighted Comparative Covid-19 Mortality Ratio [ 14 ] (CCMR) for the five European countries (average European CCMR thereafter). To compute this CCMR, the US sex- and age-specific rates of deaths involving Covid-19 for each period were first derived from Covid-19 death counts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics ( NCHS ) [ 15 ] and mid-year US population estimates by age and sex from the United Nations ( UN ) Population Division [ 16 ]: where C 19 M i US ( Y ) is the death rate for US deaths involving Covid-19 for sex and age group I in year Y , C 19 D i US ( Y ) is the NCHS number of US deaths involving Covid-19 in sex and age group i during year Y , and N i US ( y ) is the UN estimate of the size of sex and age group i in the United States at time y , the mid-point of year Y .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Covid-19 pandemic and the expansion of the mortality gap between the United States and its European peers

Heuveline¹

2023

PLoS ONE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The mortality gap between the United States and other high-income nations substantially expanded during the first two decades of the 21st century. International comparisons of Covid-19 mortality suggest this gap might have grown during the Covid-19 pandemic. Applying population-weighted average mortality rates of the five largest West European countries to the US population reveals that this mortality gap increased the number of US deaths by 34.8% in 2021, causing 892,491 “excess deaths” that year. Controlling for population size, the annual number of excess deaths has nearly doubled between 2019 and 2021 (+84.9%). Diverging trends in Covid-19 mortality contributed to this increase in excess deaths, especially towards the end of 2021 as US vaccination rates plateaued at lower levels than in European countries. In 2021, the number of excess deaths involving Covid-19 in the United States reached 223,266 deaths, representing 25.0% of all excess deaths that year. However, 45.5% of the population-standardized increase in excess deaths between 2019 and 2021 is due to other causes of deaths. While the contribution of Covid-19 to excess mortality might be transient, divergent trends in mortality from other causes persistently separates the United States from West European countries. Excess mortality is particularly high between ages 15 and 64. In 2021, nearly half of all US deaths in this age range are excess deaths (48.0%).

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Covid-19 pandemic and the expansion of the mortality gap between the United States and its European peers

Heuveline¹

2023

PLoS ONE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The data were downloaded from the “The Demography of COVID-19 Deaths” curated database ( 42 ) except for England. The United Kingdom reports by default deaths within 28 days of a positive test, which misses a substantial part of deaths.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamics-informed deconvolutional neural networks for super-resolution identification of regime changes in epidemiological time series

Vilar

Saiz

2023

Sci. Adv.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The ability to infer the timing and amplitude of perturbations in epidemiological systems from their stochastically spread low-resolution outcomes is crucial for multiple applications. However, the general problem of connecting epidemiological curves with the underlying incidence lacks the highly effective methodology present in other inverse problems, such as super-resolution and dehazing from computer vision. Here, we develop an unsupervised physics-informed convolutional neural network approach in reverse to connect death records with incidence that allows the identification of regime changes at single-day resolution. Applied to COVID-19 data with proper regularization and model-selection criteria, the approach can identify the implementation and removal of lockdowns and other nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) with 0.93-day accuracy over the time span of a year.

show abstract

“…To assess the specific contribution of Covid-19 mortality in 2020 and 2021 and its dynamics, counterfactual numbers of Covid-19 deaths in the United States were estimated for each calendar year, 2020 and 2021, as well as for the three four-quarter periods in between (ending in the first, second and third quarter of 2021 respectively). Because countries report their Covid-19 deaths by age using different age groupings, 6 the previous approach was modified as follows.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Another doubling of excess mortality in the United States relative to its European peers between 2017 and 2021

Heuveline

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Importance Previous studies have shown the pre-pandemic emergence of a gap in mortality between the United States and other high-income nations. This gap was estimated to account for nearly one in seven US deaths in 2017. Objective The number and proportion of US deaths that can be attributed to this gap is expected to have grown during the pandemic. This study aims at quantifying this growth at the end of 2021. Design This cross-sectional study uses publicly available 2017 to 2021 data on deaths from all causes and 2020-2021 Covid-19 death counts in the United States and five European countries. Number of deaths are combined with publicly available estimates of population size by sex and age group in these European countries to produce sex- and age-specific mortality rates. These rates are averaged and applied to the US population by sex and age-group to compare the resulting and actual US death counts. Setting The United States and the five most populous countries in Western Europe. Participants All deceased individuals in these countries are included in the death counts. This study does not use individual records. Intervention None. Main Outcome and Measure Total number of US deaths and their counterfactuals when substituting average sex- and age-specific mortality rates for the European countries to those that prevailed in the United States. Results The counterfactuals reveal 711,109 to 747,783 excess deaths in the United States in 2021, amounting to 20.8% to 21.7% of all US deaths that year (3,426,249). Excess deaths increased by 320,436 to 331,477 between 2017 and 2021, 80.0% to 82.7% more than the 2017 estimate. A decomposition of the lower figure showed that population change contributed little to the 2017-2021 increase in excess deaths (33,545 additional deaths). Covid-19 mortality alone continue contributed 230,672 excess deaths in 2021, more than 2020, whereas other causes of deaths contributed 56,219 more excess deaths in 2021 than in 2017. Discussion The proportion of US deaths that would be avoided if the United States could achieve the mortality of its West European counterparts surged to more than one in five during the pandemic. The large and still growing contribution of Covid-19 to excess mortality in the United States is consistent with vaccination rates plateauing at lower levels than in European countries. The overall increase in mortality from other causes during the pandemic increasingly separates the United States from West European countries as well.

show abstract

The demography of COVID-19 deaths database, a gateway to well-documented international data

Cited by 12 publications

References 8 publications

The Covid-19 pandemic and the expansion of the mortality gap between the United States and its European peers

The Covid-19 pandemic and the expansion of the mortality gap between the United States and its European peers

Dynamics-informed deconvolutional neural networks for super-resolution identification of regime changes in epidemiological time series

Another doubling of excess mortality in the United States relative to its European peers between 2017 and 2021

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About