Modeling of COVID-19 Excess Mortality in Ukraine for 2020–2021 Based on Daily and Age-Gender Data
摘要
Estimating the excess mortality in Ukraine caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is an important challenge in understanding the true burden of the pandemic. This article examines the purely excess mortality that occurs against the background of the mortality from COVID-19 with a replication of its dynamics on a larger scale. So, we are talking about both the underdiagnosis of COVID-19 when determining the causes of death, which is often a challenge because the vast majority of those who died from COVID-19 had comorbidities, and other excess deaths that occurred in the context of the mortality from COVID-19, which may be related to the pressure on the health care system, etc. Using a correlation analysis approach to daily all-cause mortality, an excess mortality estimate of 250,000 deaths (95% CI: 242,000 to 258,000) in 2020–2021 against confirmed nearly 98,000 COVID-19 fatalities was obtained. This approach is based on the assumption of low variability in the ratio of excess mortality associated with COVID-19 to confirmed mortality from COVID-19, which assumes a constant value for each of the three predominant variants of SARS-CoV-2. Using a correlation analysis approach, monthly data with age-gender structure of all-cause deaths were examined. The ratio of excess mortality to confirmed mortality from COVID-19 was estimated for nine age categories of each gender. It was established that this ratio increases with age for each gender, is higher for women regardless of age, and is higher for men adjusted for age structure.