Excess of mortality – tutorial and application to Peru

The Global Platform for the Rapid Generation and Transfer of Knowledge| on `COVID-19` and older adults in low and middle-income countries (GP-Older-COVID) recent published a Working Paper on excess of mortality in Peru.

It is meant to be a tutorial providing a step-by-step guide for the generation of robust excess mortality estimates. Excess mortality estimates the number of additional deaths occurring over a given time period under specific conditions (in this case, the presence of COVID-19), compared to the number of deaths we might reasonably expect for the same period, based on historical data. This captures both deaths directly attributed to COVID-19 and those resulting less directly from the pandemic (such as conditions that go untreated due to reduced access to health services). Together, these provide a complete view of the mortality impact of the pandemic over a specific period of time.

The estimations of excess of registered deaths based on the official death notification system (SINADEF) raises to 41,700 deaths by week 28 (ending 12.7.20). By adding non-registered deaths, total estimations are close to 54,000 deaths.

A link to the document is here.