Preliminary data on deaths show that by the end of November, 80 percent more people had died than usual during this period. This confirms that the pandemic is causing even more casualties than officially reported.
In the 46th calendar week of this year, which is November 15-21, 1,802 people died in Slovakia. In the same period before the pandemic, an average of a thousand people died per week. The difference of 800 deaths can be considered as excessive deaths caused by a high probability of a pandemic. This is either directly, ie by the covid itself, or indirectly, ie by the worsened availability of health care. A small proportion of excessive deaths can also be caused by neglected prevention and early diagnosis from the first and second waves.
A little more people died the following week. According to preliminary data, 1,812 people died in the 47th week, which is the end of November. However, the data for the last published calendar week tend to be incomplete, so the reality may be even worse.
How to read death chart
The horizontal axis shows the calendar weeks. These are marked as a year and W is followed by the number of the calendar week. On the vertical axis, in turn, are the total deaths in a given week.
The black line expresses the average number of deaths from 2015 to 2019, ie the five-year pre-pandemic average. He says how many people died by default in a given week. In the winter, it dies more than in the warmer months, so the average is calculated separately for each week.
The black dashed lines represent the limits of the standard deviation from the mean. These express variation in the data, meaning that in some weeks the number of deaths in the past may have moved away from the average, typically in the winter due to severe influenza epidemics. To put it simply – the gray field represents the space in which deaths would normally move even with regard to the possible fluctuations of the dying curve.
The gray dashed line shows the five-year pre-pandemic records for a given calendar week.
The most important is the red line in the graph. It expresses the current number of deaths, ie for the years 2020 and 2021. The graph ends on the 47th calendar week, ie on 28 November. Fresher data is not yet available.
You can view the graph by region.
We do not yet know the number of deaths in December, but due to the development of the epidemic situation in Slovakia, it can be expected that mortality increased rapidly in the first half of December. The peak of the third wave has occurred at the end of November, but the situation in the hospitals did not begin to calm down until the beginning of December and the death curve for covid is still not falling.
From July 2021, which is unofficially considered to be the beginning of the third wave in Slovakia, until the end of November, respectively in the 27th to 47th calendar week, 1,828 people officially succumbed to the pulmonary form of covid. However, the number of excessive deaths in the same period was up to 4.5 thousand. The difference is more than two thousand deaths.
In any social or political debate where the consequences of a pandemic for people’s lives are mentioned, it is not right to rely solely on officially announced covid deaths. Excessive deaths are a more public indicator of the strength and tragic nature of a pandemic.
Mortality data also show how tragic the year 2021 is. From January to November, 64,039 people died in Slovakia, while in 2019 53,234 people died in the whole year. Mortality in Slovakia has remained stable for decades at around 53,000 per year. A pandemic changed that. After taking into account the December data, which we do not yet know, 2021 will be the year with the historically highest number of deaths in Slovakia and the unprecedentedly most tragic year since the Second World War.
Excessive mortality has so far hit the Prešov region the most. At the end of November, mortality there had increased by 135 percent compared to normal pre-pandemic mortality. In human language, this means that under normal circumstances, around 130 people in the whole region would die in a week, but in the second half of November this year, 300 people died there in a week.
In addition, excessive mortality in the Prešov region has already surpassed the peak of the second wave. The other regions of northern and eastern Slovakia are also close to the top of the second wave.
As can be seen in the chart above, which can be filtered by region, the least excessive deaths were in the Bratislava, Trnava and Nitra regions. The fact that the third wave arrived in this area a little later than the north of Slovakia may be behind the lower excess mortality in these regions. The second reason may be higher vaccinations. The Bratislava, Trnava and Nitra regions belong among the most vaccinated regions.
Read on
Graphs and maps on the state of vaccination in Slovakia
The chart below compares the development of reported deaths per covid and the development of excessive deaths. Reported deaths are delayed compared to excessive deaths, mainly because the report of a covid death is still preceded by an autopsy.
What is interesting about this chart, however, is that at the end of last year, the scissors have significantly widened between reported and excessive deaths. It could be the effect of overcrowded hospitals. That would mean two things in principle. Firstly, that people with covid died to a greater extent at home and did not undergo their autopsies, and that people also died largely of diagnoses that they would not have died of if they got to the hospital.
In terms of covid statistics, this could also mean that reported deaths on covid have a ceiling that is determined by the capacity of hospitals. However, that ceiling does not mean that more people are no longer dying, but only that we can no longer reliably count the victims of the covoid from this limit.
The graph below shows mortality by age group. It can be seen, for example, that in this wave, excessive mortality has so far mainly affected older people. However, the second wave showed that younger grades, such as forties, fifties, but also in their sixties, culminated in excessive deaths a little later than in older ones. This may be due to the fact that younger people die more slowly after infection.
Higher excessive mortality among younger years is likely to be reflected in the December data.
The last graph shows individual deaths on covid and with covid according to age and day since the beginning of the pandemic, when the persons died. It can also be seen in it that with the passage of time in a given wave, death penetrates in greater numbers among the younger years.