Tracking excess mortality across countries during the COVID-19 pandemic with the World Mortality Dataset.

ABSTRACT: Comparing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic between countries or across time is difficult because the reported numbers of cases and deaths can be strongly affected by testing capacity and reporting policy. Excess mortality, defined as the increase in all-cause mortality relative to the expected mortality, is widely considered as a more objective indicator of the COVID-19 death toll. However, there has been no global, frequently updated repository of the all-cause mortality data across countries. To fill this gap, we have collected weekly, monthly, or quarterly all-cause mortality data from 103 countries and territories, openly available as the regularly updated World Mortality Dataset. We used this dataset to compute the excess mortality in each country during the COVID-19 pandemic. We f

SUBMITTER: Karlinsky A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8331176 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature