Estimates of excess mortality for the five Nordic countries during the COVID-19 pandemic 2020−2021

  1. Kasper P Kepp
  2. Jonas Björk
  3. Vasilis Kontis
  4. Robbie M Parks
  5. Kristoffer T Bæk
  6. Louise Emilsson
  7. Tea Lallukka

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Abstract

Background

Excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic is of major scientific and political interest.

Methods

We critically reviewed different estimates of all-cause excess mortality for the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden), which have been much studied during the COVID-19 pandemic, using the latest register data to discuss uncertainties and implications.

Results

We show using back-calculation of expected deaths from Nordic all-cause deaths that the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation model is a clear outlier in the compared estimates and likely substantially overestimates excess mortality of Finland and Denmark, and probably Sweden. Our review suggests a range of total Nordic excess deaths of perhaps 15 000–20 000, but results are sensitive to assumptions in the models as shown.

Conclusions

We document substantial heterogeneity and uncertainty in estimates of excess mortality. All estimates should be taken with caution in their interpretation as they miss detailed account of demographics, such as changes in the age group populations over the study period.

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  1. Version published to 10.1093/ije/dyac204
  2. Version published to 10.1101/2022.05.07.22274789v2 on medRxiv
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    SciScore for 10.1101/2022.05.07.22274789: (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: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

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    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

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    • 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.

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  4. Version published to 10.1101/2022.05.07.22274789v1 on medRxiv