Excessmortality due to Covid-19? A comparison of totalmortality in 2020 with totalmortality in 2016 to 2019 in Germany, Sweden and Spain

Methods
Using death and population figures from the EUROSTAT database, we estimated weekly and cumulative Standardized Mortality Ratios (SMR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the year 2020.We applied two approaches to calculate weekly numbers of death expected in 2020: first, we used mean weekly mortality rates from 2016 to 2019 as expected mortality rates for 2020, and, second, to consider increasing life expectancy, we calculated expected mortality rates for 2020 by extrapolation from mortality rates from 2016 to 2019.

Results
In the first approach, the cumulative SMRs show that in Germany and Sweden there was no or little excess mortality in 2020 (SMR = 0.976 (95%CI: 0.974–0.978), and 1.030 (1.023–1.036), respectively), while in Spain the excess mortality was 4.8%(1.148 (1.144–1.151)). In the second approach, the corresponding SMRs for Germany and Sweden increased to 1.009 (1.007–1.011) and 1.083 (1.076–1.090), respectively, whereas results for Spain were virtually unchanged.

Доказательная медицина, COVID-19, ЗОЖ