ArticleScientific reports2022
Excess mortality in Belarus during the COVID-19 pandemic as the case study of a country with limited non-pharmaceutical interventions and limited reporting.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in low-and lower-middle-income countries: a systematic review and meta-analysis.BMC public health · 2024Pooled it
- Clustering-based methodology for comparing multi-characteristic epidemiological dynamics with application to COVID-19 epidemiology in Europe.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Article
- StatModPredict: A user-friendly R-Shiny interface for fitting and forecasting with statistical models.PloS one · 2025Article
- Evaluating the direct effect of vaccination and non-pharmaceutical interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe.Communications medicine · 2024Article
- Evaluating the forecasting performance of ensemble sub-epidemic frameworks and other time series models for the 2022-2023 mpox epidemic.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Article
- Comparing methods to predict baseline mortality for excess mortality calculations.BMC medical research methodology · 2023Article
- Retrospective evaluation of short-term forecast performance of ensemble sub-epidemic frameworks and other time-series models: The 2022-2023 mpox outbreak across multiple geographical scales, July 14medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2023Article
- Excess mortality in Ukraine during the course of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Global Excess Mortality during COVID-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Vaccines · 2022Review
- Stress Perception and Coping Strategies of Students on Both Sides of the EU's Eastern Border during the COVID-19 Pandemic.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on physical activity, life satisfaction, anxiety, stress perception and coping strategies in student-athletes: A comparison between Belarus and Poland-countries with a different approach of anti-pandemic measures.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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Abstract
Public health intervention to contain the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic significantly differed by country since the SARS-CoV-2 spread varied regionally in time and in scale. Since vaccinations were not available until the end of 2020 non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) remained the only strategies to mitigate the pandemic spread at that time. Belarus in Europe is one of a few countries with a high Human Development Index where no lockdowns have ever been implemented and only limited NPIs have taken place for a period of time. Therefore, the Belarusian case was evaluated and compared in terms of the mortality burden. Since the COVID-19 mortality was low, the excess overall mortality was studied for Belarus. Since no overall mortality data have been reported past June 2020 the analysis was complemented by the study of Google Trends funeral-related search queries up until August 2021. Depending on the model, the Belarusian mortality for June of 2020 was 29 to 39% higher than otherwise expected with the corresponding estimated excess death was from 2953 to 3690 while the reported COVID-19 mortality for June 2020 was only 157 cases. The Belarusian excess mortality for June 2020 was higher than for all neighboring countries with an excess of 5% for Poland, 5% for Ukraine, 8% for Russia, 11% for Lithuania and 11% for Latvia. The relationship between Google Trends and mortality time series was studied using Granger's test and the results were statistically significant. The results for Google Trends searches did vary by key phrase with the largest excess of 138% for April 2020 and 148% for September 2020 was observed for a key phrase "coffin", while the largest excess of 218% for January 2021 was observed for "funeral services". In summary, there are indications of the excess overall mortality in Belarus, which is larger than the reported COVID-19-related mortality.
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