Researchers with the World Health Organization explain mistakes in high-profile mortality estimates for Germany and Sweden.
). Official systematic updates of estimates for excess mortality — including for Germany and Sweden — will follow “in the next iteration planned later this year”, says Somnath Chatterji, a senior adviser in the WHO’s Division of Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact in Geneva, Switzerland.
This kind of project can give only rough approximations, because it requires complex modelling and regular revision as new data come in. For instance, only 100 of the world’s countries have so far reported national deaths data each month for at least part of the pandemic period, the WHO says.
pointed out that the organization’s prediction of expected mortality in Germany in 2020–21 was surprisingly low, pushing up the excess death figures.Researchers model expected mortality by extrapolating historical trends. For instance, the World Mortality Dataset , one widely cited project, uses a linear extrapolation from deaths in 2015–19 to account for underlying mortality trends.
After the criticisms, Wakefield and the WHO team re-examined their extrapolation method. But they then discovered a second problem, which turned out to be a bigger concern: their data for actual deaths in Germany did not match the raw data from German statistical offices, also collated in projects such as the WMD. This mismatch affected not only deaths reported in 2020 and 2021, but also the 2015–19 historical data. That had played a major part in their low extrapolation of expected deaths.
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