Excess mortality 2020 – 2022

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The topic of excess mortality continues to heat up people's minds. Now the study “authored by Christof Kuhbandner and Matthias Reitzner and published on May 23, 2023”Estimation of excess mortality in Germany in the period 2020-2022“ (in English) from seven reviewers in the period from April 19th. checked by May 22, 2023.

A summary of the content in German is available here website available.

„The results show that the observed number of deaths in 2020 was close to the expected number in terms of the empirical standard deviation. Approximately 4,000 excess deaths occurred. In contrast, the observed number of deaths in 2021 was two empirical standard deviations above the expected number and even more than four times the empirical standard deviation in 2022. Overall, the number of excess deaths in 2021 is about 34,000 and in 2022 about 34,000 66,000 deaths, resulting in a cumulative 100,000 excess deaths in both years. The high excess mortality in 2021 and 2022 was mainly due to an increase in deaths in the age groups between 15 and 79 years and only accumulated from April 2021. A similar mortality pattern was observed in stillbirths with an increase of about 9.4% in the second quarter and 19.4% in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared to previous years.“ …

“Conclusions: This study used the state-of-the-art actuarial science method to estimate the expected number of all-cause deaths and the increase in all-cause mortality for the pandemic years 2020 to 2022 in Germany. In 2020, the observed number of deaths was extremely close to the expected number, but in 2021, the observed number of deaths was well above the expected number, on the order of twice the empirical standard deviation, and in 2022, even above the expected number more than four times the empirical standard deviation. The analysis of age-dependent monthly excess mortality showed that high excess mortality from spring 2021 is responsible for excess mortality in 2021 and 2022. An analysis of the number of stillbirths showed a mortality pattern similar to that for the age group between 15 and 80 years.

As a starting point for further research that explains these mortality patterns, we compared excess mortality with the number of reported COVID-19 deaths and the number of COVID-19 vaccinations. This leads to several open questions, the most important of which is the covariation between excess mortality, the number of COVID-19 deaths and COVID-19 vaccinations.”