Average excess mortality for various countries from March 2020 to January 2021

[muriel_volestrangler]

Our World In Data has a page for 'excess mortality' - which is a measure of how many extra (or fewer, which shows as a negative percentage) deaths there have been in countries (weekly for some, monthly for others). This can count Covid deaths that aren't being reported on death certificates (perhaps because that country isn't, or wasn't, testing widely), or other deaths that may be a result of the pandemic (eg hospitals unable to give care they could have if they weren't restricted by dealing with Covid patients). It also shows it relative to the number of deaths a country normally has, which you might argue is interesting, because some countries have older populations, and thus get more deaths per capita anyway - and since Covid affects the elderly more, you'd expect more Covid deaths there, even if the country is 'coping' the same as a younger country.

For example, the US excess deaths peaked at 45% on Jan 3rd, and had gone down to 20% by Feb 7th.

They don't seem to have the option of looking at the cumulative excess deaths over the whole period, so I put the figures into a spreadsheet, to work out the average from the start of March 2020 up to the latest figure available for a country.



It's not strictly 'accurate', since mortality is seasonal, and more so in some countries than others, so just averaging weekly figures doesn't give the weight to the typically-worse weeks that it should. But I think it gives a reasonable idea of how well countries have done to prevent deaths.

You can see Mexico's disaster, which they admitted a few days ago, really clearly. They've had loads more deaths, relatively, than Brazil, despite that government's screw-ups. I've shown other countries that have been in the news at some time for their rates, and also Norway, which has managed the pandemic so well that it's had slightly fewer deaths in the past year than on average. The USA had had a higher excess death percentage, on average, than the UK, although the 'per capita' number looks better, because the USA has a younger population, and you'd expect that to mean fewer Covid deaths per capita.

[Cracklin Charlie]

1. This chart makes me want to cry.

In one year.

[yonder]

2. KnR