ArticleSocial science & medicine (1982)2020
Excess mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic: Early evidence from England and Wales.
Article in Social science & medicine (1982), 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 118 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Deep disadvantage in mortality on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Sex- and age-specific differences in excess mortality in China during the COVID-19 pandemic: a study based on official vital statistics data.Frontiers in epidemiology · 2025Article
- Impact of COVID-19 Infection and Related Social Concerns on Depressive Symptoms: Mediating Effects of Negative Changes in Daily Life and Moderating Effects of Age and Gender.Psychiatry investigation · 2024Article
- Underreporting of Cases in the COVID-19 Outbreak of Borriana (Spain) during Mass Gathering Events in March 2020: A Cross-Sectional Study.Epidemiologia (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on non-COVID-associated mortality: A descriptive longitudinal study of UK data.Public health in practice (Oxford, England) · 2024Article
- Age at death during the Covid-19 lockdown in French metropolitan regions: a non parametric quantile regression approach.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Conventional and frugal methods of estimating COVID-19-related excess deaths and undercount factors.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Non-COVID-19 Deaths: Population-Wide Retrospective Cohort Study.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2024Article
- Eco-friendly spectrophotometric methods for determination of remdesivir and favipiravir; the recently approved antivirals for COVID-19 treatment.Spectrochimica acta. Part A, Molecular and biomolecular spectroscopy · 2023Article
- Deaths during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic: insights from regional patterns in Germany and Poland.BMC public health · 2023Article
- COVID-19-Specific Mortality among World Trade Center Health Registry Enrollees Who Resided in New York City.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Gaps between official and excess Covid-19 mortality measures: The effects of institutional quality and vaccinations.Economic modelling · 2022Article
- Article
- High Non-COVID-19 in-Hospital Deaths during the First Lockdown in Israel Compared with the Second and Third Lockdowns.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Article
- Application of Bayesian spatial-temporal models for estimating unrecognized COVID-19 deaths in the United States.Spatial statistics · 2022Article
- Health-related and socio-economic burden of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vienna.Health & social care in the community · 2022Article
- Infodemiological study on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on increased headache incidences at the world level.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The Effects of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 on the Reported Mental Health Symptoms of Nonprofessional Carers: An Analysis Across Europe.Value in health : the journal of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.