Excess mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic: Early evidence from England and Wales
Open accessPublished version of a preprint
Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has claimed many lives in the UK and globally. The objective of this paper is to study whether the number of deaths not registered as Covid-19-related has increased compared to what would have been expected in the absence of the pandemic. Reasons behind this might include Covid-19 underreporting, avoiding visits to hospitals or GPs, and the effects of the lockdown. I used weekly ONS data on the number of deaths in England and Wales that did not officially involve Covid-19 over the period 2015-2020. Simply observing trends is not sufficient as spikes in deaths may occasionally occur. I thus followed a difference-in-differences econometric approach to study whether there was a relative increase in deaths not registered as Covid-19-related during the pandemic, compared to a control. Results suggest that there were an additional 968 weekly deaths that officially did not involve Covid-19, compared to what would have otherwise been expected. It is possible that some people are dying from Covid-19 without being diagnosed, and/or that there are excess deaths due to other causes as a result of the pandemic. Analysing the cause of death for any excess non-covid-19 deaths will shed light upon the reasons for the increase in such deaths and will help design appropriate policy responses to save lives.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Interventions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic may have indirectly affected other causes of death.
“Moreover, interventions imposed during the pandemic may have indirectly affected other causes of death.4”
From Estimating the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality, life expectancy and lifespan inequality in England and Wales: a population-level analysis (2021) · cites this paper as [4]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
Kawachi, I. I. (2001) · Journal of Heredity · doi:10.1093/jurban/78.3.458 · Cited by 3,565 · see citing works
Autor, D. H. (2003) · Journal of Labor Economics · doi:10.1086/344122 · Cited by 1,534 · see citing works
Air pollution and mortality in the Medicare population
Di, Q., Wang, Y., Zanobetti, A., Wang, Y., Koutrakis, P., Choirat, C., Dominici, F., & Schwartz, J. D. (2017) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejmoa1702747 · Cited by 1,510 · see citing works
Lahti‐Koski, M., Pietinen, P., Heliövaara, M., & Vartiainen, E. A. (2002) · American Journal of Clinical Nutrition · doi:10.1093/ajcn/75.5.809 · Cited by 354 · see citing works
Mental health benefits of physical activity
Saxena, S., Van Ommeren, M., Tang, K. C., & Armstrong, T. P. (2005) · Journal of Mental Health · doi:10.1080/09638230500270776 · Cited by 232 · see citing works
Metcalfe, R., Powdthavee, N., & Dolan, P. (2011) · The Economic Journal · doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2010.02416.x · Cited by 207 · see citing works
Declining Autopsy Rates and Suicide Misclassification
Kapusta, N. D. (2011) · Archives of General Psychiatry · doi:10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.66 · Cited by 171 · see citing works
Excess Mortality Estimation During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Preliminary Data from Portugal
Nogueira, P., Nobre, M. D. A., Nicola, P., et al. (2020) · Acta Médica Portuguesa · doi:10.20344/amp.13928 · Cited by 110 · see citing works
The association between economic uncertainty and suicide in the short-run
Vandoros, S., Avendaño, M., & Kawachi, I. I. (2018) · Social Science & Medicine · doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.11.035 · Cited by 99 · see citing works
Self-citationExcess mortality in the United States during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic
Rivera, R., Rosenbaum, J. E., & Quispe, W. (2020) · Epidemiology and Infection · doi:10.1017/s0950268820002617 · Cited by 83 · see citing works
Who Got the Brexit Blues? The Effect of Brexit on Subjective Wellbeing in the UK
Powdthavee, N., Plagnol, A. C., Frijters, P., & Clark, A. E. (2019) · Economica · doi:10.1111/ecca.12304 · Cited by 60 · see citing works
Modi, C., Böhm, V., Ferraro, S., Stein, G., & Seljak, U. (2020) · medRxiv · doi:10.1101/2020.04.15.20067074 · Cited by 59 · see citing works
Gibertoni, D., Adja, K. Y. C., Golinelli, D., Reno, C., Regazzi, L., Lenzi, J., Sanmarchi, F., & Fantini, M. P. (2021) · Health & Place · doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2021.102508 · Cited by 50 · see citing works
Flegal, K. M., Kit, B. K., & Graubard, B. I. (2017) · American Journal of Epidemiology · doi:10.1093/aje/kwx193 · Cited by 49 · see citing works
Noelke, C., & Avendaño, M. (2015) · American Journal of Epidemiology · doi:10.1093/aje/kwv094 · Cited by 40 · see citing works
Vandoros, S. (2020) · American Journal of Epidemiology · doi:10.1093/aje/kwaa016 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Self-citation
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 4
- Gibertoni D. Adja K.Y.C. Golinelli D. Reno C. Regazzi L. Fantini M.P. Patterns of COVID-19 Related Excess Mortality in the Municipalities of Northern Italy 2020 medRxiv 10.1101/2020.05.11.20097964 2020.05.11.20097964 PMC7834600 33476843 · DOI
- Modi C. Boehm V. Ferraro S. Stein G. Seljak U. Total COVID-19 Mortality in Italy: Excess, Mortality and Age Dependence through Time-Series Analysis 2020 medRxiv
- Oke J. Heneghan C. COVID-19 - Collateral Damage in Scotland. Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine 2020 University of Oxford Available at https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-collateral-damage-in-scotland/
- Rivera R. Rosenbaum J. Quispe W. Estimating Excess Deaths in the United States Early in the COVID-19 Pandemic 2020 medRxiv 10.1101/2020.05.04.20090324 PMC7653492 33115546 · DOI
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Aburto, J. M., Kashyap, R., Schöley, J., Angus, C., Ermisch, J., Mills, M. C., & Dowd, J. B. (2021) · Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health · doi:10.1136/jech-2020-215505 · Cited by 159 · see citing works
No evidence of increase in suicide in Greece during the first wave of Covid-19.
Vandoros, S., Theodorikakou, O., Katsadoros, K., Zafeiropoulou, D., & Kawachi, I. (2020) · doi:10.1101/2020.11.13.20231571 · Cited by 15 · see citing works
Self-citation
- Authors
- Vandoros, S.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Vandoros, Sotiris
- ORCID
- Vandoros, Sotiris
- Venue
- Social Science & Medicine
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2020-08
- Volume
- 258
- Pages
- 113101
- ISSN
- 0277-9536 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7836531
- OpenAlex
- W3028688139
- Cited by
- 125
- References
- 16
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 22 · 2021: 55 · 2020: 23
- FWCI
- 4.33
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Social Science & Medicine (publishedVersion)
- medRxiv (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Modeling and Simulation › COVID-19 epidemiological studies
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Oncology › COVID-19 and healthcare impacts
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Healthcare Systems and Challenges
- Keywords
- excess mortality, COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown effects, healthcare avoidance, causes of death, England and Wales
- MeSH terms
- COVID-19, England, Female, Humans, Male, Mortality, Pneumonia, Viral, Wales, Coronavirus Infections, Pandemics
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
