Significantly more people died in 2020 and 2021 than was expected. The excess mortality is a lot higher than the officially reported death figures, it is almost three times as high. This is shown by a new study by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the journal “Nature”. Marcel Zwahlen is an epidemiologist at the University of Bern and has studied excess mortality during the pandemic in Switzerland.
SRF News: What can you conclude from the fact that the excess mortality worldwide is three times as high as the number of people who have officially died from Corona?
Marcel Zwahlen: There were either difficulties in recording those who died from Corona or those who died with a Corona infection worldwide, because a PCR test was needed. That was not guaranteed everywhere. Or there has been additional collateral damage from the pandemic. I think that’s rather unlikely.
You think these ten million deaths, which cannot be explained by the official corona death figures, still died from corona?
Yes. This has to do with how attempts were made to calculate the number of corona deaths. You take the development of deaths in the years 2016 to 2019. If you calculate the historical trend and seasonality for the years 16 to 19 and continue with the argument that we would have expected it if Corona hadn’t come, then you get there to this excess mortality.
From March to June, July 2020 there were strict lockdowns in many countries. Back then we even had an immortality.
We don’t see anything else that should have been different. In the early months from March to July 2020 there were strict lockdowns in many countries. Back then we even had an immortality. Many fatalities were prevented in road traffic.
Is it realistic that the world underestimates the corona deaths by a factor of three?
I think so. It was only a small selection of those who had severe illnesses and could also have a PCR test.
A few people died in our nursing homes who were not initially registered as corona deaths.
Even in the rich countries we had too few tests at the very beginning, some people died in our nursing homes who were not initially registered as corona deaths because they were not tested at all. The reporting regulations were not always complied with in Switzerland either.
The World Health Organization breaks down death rates by income in each country. It can be seen that the discrepancy between official death figures and excess mortality is greatest in middle-income countries. Why should middle-income countries have the worst estimates of the number of corona deaths?
Another point is that poorer regions of the world have a younger population structure. Even if they score poorly, they haven’t had that much of an impact on excess mortality. If they have only a few 60-year-olds and older in their total population and two-thirds are under 30, then you don’t see much excess mortality either, much less than in the wealthier European countries with just 15 to 20 percent of the population who are 65 or older .
Middle-income countries already have significant sections of the population that are older.
Middle-income countries already have significant sections of the population that are older. This means that the excess mortality was higher among them, but their reporting systems were not top either. This means that they are already counting the number of corona deaths.
The conversation was conducted by Sandro Della Torre.