Abstract
In Austria, the first confirmed COVID-19 death occurred in early March 2020. Since then, the question as to whether and, if so, to what extent the COVID-19 pandemic has increased overall mortality has been raised in the public and academic discourse. In an effort to answer this question, Statistics Vienna (City of Vienna, Department for Economic Affairs, Labour and Statistics) has evaluated the weekly mortality trends in Vienna, and compared them to the trends in other Austrian provinces. For our analysis, we draw on data from Statistics Austria and the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES), which are published along with data on the actual and the expected weekly numbers of deaths via the Vienna Mortality Monitoring website. Based on the definition of excess mortality as the actual number of reported deaths from all causes minus the expected number of deaths, we calculate the weekly prediction intervals of the expected number of deaths for two age groups (0 to 64 years and 65 years and older). The temporal scope of the analysis covers not only the current COVID-19 pandemic, but also previous flu seasons and summer heat waves. The results show the actual weekly numbers of deaths and the corresponding prediction intervals for Vienna and the other Austrian provinces since 2007. Our analysis underlines the importance of comparing time series of COVID-19-related excess deaths at the sub-national level in order to highlight within-country heterogeneities.
Highlights
In Vienna, the first coronavirus infection case was reported on 26 February 2020
Our analysis of weekly mortality in Austria and its nine provinces since 2007 showed that there was a significant increase in the number of deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic
We developed an excess mortality model that was sensitive to the seasonality of mortality, as well as to changes in population size and age structure
Summary
In Vienna, the first coronavirus infection case was reported on 26 February 2020. The first COVID-19-related death in Austria was registered a week later (5 March 2020) in the province of Tyrol. More than one and a half years later (at the end of August 2021), the total number of reported cases of COVID-19 in Austria was over 700,000, despite the implementation of public health measures aimed at limiting the spread of the disease (i.e., physical and social distancing, lockdowns, curfews, mask mandates etc.) (AGES, 2021a).. It is assumed that changes in social behaviour, which might or might not be triggered by various government-imposed measures, are reflected in the official case count with a lag of 10 to 14 days; and that deaths from COVID-19 usually occur within four weeks of the initial infection (Nivette et al, 2021; RKI, 2021)
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