Excess mortality in Russia due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020: regional analysis

Abstract

One of the most important tasks for assessing the damage from a pandemic is the assessment of human losses resulting from the disease. As a rule, it is rather difficult to estimate the direct number of deaths from COVID-19, due to both the methodological difficulties in assessing the causes of death and the choice of a reference point for assessing excess mortality. The existing approaches, such as comparing with the previous year or the average mortality figure over the past few years are associated with numerous problems. To get a more objective assessment of the number of deaths in the absence of a pandemic, it is necessary to use the projected number of deaths considering the age structure of the population.

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