Science, Space and Technology News 2024
New research reveals many excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic were likely due to uncounted virus fatalities, challenging the accuracy of official death counts and underscoring the need for precise mortality data. Credit: SciTechDaily.com
Focusing on excess deaths by natural causes rather than all-cause excess death estimates provides a more accurate understanding of the true number of deaths attributable to COVID-19, as it eliminates external causes for mortality, such as intentional or unintentional injuries, for which COVID-19 would not be a contributing factor.
If the primary explanation for these deaths were healthcare interruptions and delays in care, the non-COVID excess deaths would likely occur after a peak in reported COVID-19 deaths and subsequent interruptions in care, says study lead author Eugenio Paglino, a PhD student studying demography and sociology at UPenn. “However, this pattern was not observed nationally or in any of the geographic subregions we assessed,” Paglino says.
Analyzing both temporal and geographical patterns of these deaths, the researchers found that the gap between these non-COVID excess deaths and reported COVID-19 deaths was largest in nonmetropolitan counties, the West, and the South—and that the second year of the pandemic saw almost as as many non-COVID excess deaths in the second year of the pandemic as in the first year, contrary to previous research.
“Rapid detection of non-typical mortality patterns could pinpoint the emergence of local novel disease clusters and become an important tool for more effective pandemic mitigation,” says Yannis Paschalidis, distinguished professor of engineering, director of the Hariri Institute, and principal investigator of a National Science Foundation project at BU on Predicting and Preventing Epidemic to Pandemic Transitions.
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