Excess deaths in the United States during the first year of COVID-19.

ABSTRACT: Accurately determining the number of excess deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is hard. The most important challenge is determining the counterfactual count of baseline deaths that would have occurred in its absence. Flexible estimation methods were used here to provide this baseline number and plausibility of the resulting estimates was evaluated by examining how changes between baseline and actual prior year deaths compared to historical year-over-year changes during the previous decade. Similar comparisons were used to examine the reasonableness of excess death estimates obtained in prior research. Total, group-specific and cause-specific excess deaths in the U.S. from March 2020 through February 2021 were calculated using publicly available data covering all deaths from March 2009

SUBMITTER: Ruhm CJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9304075 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature