Background

This Stats Café builds on an earlier session on COVID-19 and death registration, which featured towards the beginning of the pandemic in mid-2020. Since then, over five million COVID-19 deaths have been reported, however, estimates predict that the global excess deaths may be two to four times higher than those officially recorded. Being able to ascertain the true impact of COVID-19 on human lives is critical for informing resource allocation and assessing the effectiveness of public health interventions as the pandemic evolves. However, many countries still lack functioning civil registration and vital statistics systems to provide accurate, complete and timely data on deaths and causes of death. This, coupled with the differences in how countries test and report COVID-19 deaths, makes it challenging to measure the true loss of life from the pandemic. The COVID-19 mortality rate has also sparked heated discussions among the general public, with false claims circulating online that the number of COVID-19 deaths have been inflated in order to justify lockdowns and other restrictions.

Demographers, data scientists, and epidemiologists have turned to the estimation of excess mortality to try to understand just how many people died as a result of COVID-19. Excess mortality estimates measure the gap between the number of deaths in an average year under normal conditions and the number of deaths during a crisis, adjusting for relevant demographic changes as far as possible. This Stats Café aimed to share a snapshot of some of the varied approaches taken by countries and organizations to produce estimates of excess mortality, as well as provide a journalistic insight of best practices in reporting on it.

Agenda for this session

• Welcoming Remarks, housekeeping and overview of session: Ms. Rachael Beaven, Director, Statistics Division, ESCAP
• Introduction to estimating excess mortality: Mr. Steve MacFeely, WHO
• Technical insight from the South African experience of estimating excess mortality: Professor Tom Moultrie, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Mortality deficit in New Zealand through the COVID-19 pandemic: Ms. Helen He, Stats News Zealand
• Estimating excess mortality in Malaysia: Dr. Shubash Shander, Ministry of Health, Malaysia
• Trusting the numbers and tackling misinformation: perspectives of a data journalist: Ms. Rukmini Shrinivasan, Independent Data Journalist
• Q and A and wrap-up