Regional excess mortality during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in five European countries
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on excess mortality from all causes in 2020 varied across and within European countries. Using data for 2015–2019, we applied Bayesian spatio-temporal models to quantify the expected weekly deaths at the regional level had the pandemic not occurred in England, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. With around 30%, Madrid, Castile-La Mancha, Castile-Leon (Spain) and Lombardia (Italy) were the regions with the highest excess mortality. In England, Greece and Switzerland, the regions most affected were Outer London and the West Midlands (England), Eastern, Western and Central Macedonia (Greece), and Ticino (Switzerland), with 15–20% excess mortality in 2020. Our study highlights the importance of the large transportation hubs for establishing community transmission in the first stages of the pandemic. Here, we show that acting promptly to limit transmission around these hubs is essential to prevent spread to other regions and countries.
Article activity feed
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.18.21264686: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Weaknesses include the lack of detailed data on the causes of death, which would have allowed insights into the sources of the observed variation in excess deaths. Several previous studies reported nationwide excess mortality for 2020. The Office for National Statistics in England reported a 17.9% increase in male mortality and 11.2% in females [11]. A recent study of 40 industrialised countries covered the period from February 2020 to …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.18.21264686: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Weaknesses include the lack of detailed data on the causes of death, which would have allowed insights into the sources of the observed variation in excess deaths. Several previous studies reported nationwide excess mortality for 2020. The Office for National Statistics in England reported a 17.9% increase in male mortality and 11.2% in females [11]. A recent study of 40 industrialised countries covered the period from February 2020 to February 2021 and found an excess mortality of 15% to 20% in England and Wales, Spain and Italy [20]. Our estimates are lower but credibility intervals include the figures from both studies. Reasons for the discrepancies include the different periods used to train the model, different data sources, different prediction periods and the exclusion of Wales from our data [21]. Our results are in line with estimates from the Hellenic Statistical Authority, which reported a 7.3% increase in the relative excess in Greece during 2020 [10], a Swiss study reporting a 10.6% increase in excess mortality in males and a 7.2% increases in females relative to 2019 [22] and the estimates from the Italian National Institute of Statistics [23]. The latter reported a 15.6% excess for 2020 compared to the average number of deaths 2015 to 2019 [23]. In Spain, the relative excess mortality varied from 26.8% to 77.9% across the different age groups for the period March to May 2020 and from 10.0% to 18.9% during the period July to December 2020 [24]. At the regional le...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
-
