SynthesisBMC public health2024
Excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in low-and lower-middle-income countries: a systematic review and meta-analysis.
Synthesis in BMC public health, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Do Mobile Phone Surveys Supplement Other Mortality Surveillance Methods? Results From a National Study in Bangladesh.Tropical medicine & international health : TM & IH · 2026Article
- Excess Mortality During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Sonora, Mexico, 2015-2022: A Time-Series Analysis of Cause-Specific Mortality.Epidemiologia (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Mortality Patterns and Trends in Fars Province, Iran (2015-2024): A Retrospective Analysis of Death Records.Iranian journal of medical sciences · 2026Article
- An approach to assess the impact of measures mitigating burden associated with COVID-19 in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia).Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Out-of-Hospital Excess Mortality From Cardiovascular Diseases During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil.Cureus · 2026Article
- Dose-dependent antiviral effects of glycyrrhizin, curcumin, and harmaline against clinical SARS-CoV-2 isolates, including D614G, Omicron BA.5, and Omicron XBB.1.BMC complementary medicine and therapies · 2026Article
- Excess life-years and productive life-years lost in Poland through the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic years.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2026Article
- Deaths of female sex workers and sexually exploited adolescent girls during the COVID-19 pandemic in Kenya, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Results of a cross-sectional study.PLOS global public health · 2026Article
- Restoring life expectancy in low-income countries: the combined impact of COVID-19, health expenditure, GDP, and child mortality.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Intubation Versus Tracheotomy Outcomes in Critically Ill COVID-19 Patients in Low-Resource Settings: What Do We Know?Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Article
- Ceftriaxone Resistance in the Surgical Adult Intensive Care Unit at Muhimbili National Hospital, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.The East African health research journal · 2025Article
- Beyond death counts: how COVID-19 affected excess mortality and productive life-years lost across 28 European states, 2020-2023.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundAlthough the COVID-19 pandemic claimed a great deal of lives, it is still unclear how it affected mortality in low- and lower-middle-income countries (LLMICs). This review summarized the available literature on excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in LLMICs, including methods, sources of data, and potential contributing factors that might have influenced excess mortality.
methodsWe conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis on excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in LLMICs in line with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) 2020 guidelines We searched PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, Google Scholar, and Scopus. We included studies published from 2019 onwards with a non-COVID-19 period of at least one year as a comparator. The meta-analysis included studies reporting data on population size, as well as observed and expected deaths. We used the Mantel-Haenszel method to estimate the pooled risk ratio with 95% confidence intervals. The protocol was registered in PROSPERO (ID: CRD42022378267).
resultsThe review covered 29 countries, with 10 countries included in the meta-analysis. The pooled meta-analysis included 1,405,128,717 individuals, for which 2,152,474 deaths were expected, and 3,555,880 deaths were reported. Calculated excess mortality was 100.3 deaths per 100,000 population per year, with an excess risk of death of 1.65 (95% CI: 1.649, 1.655, p < 0.001). The data sources used in the studies included civil registration systems, surveys, public cemeteries, funeral counts, obituary notifications, burial site imaging, and demographic surveillance systems. The primary techniques used to estimate excess mortality were statistical forecast modelling and geospatial analysis. One out of the 24 studies found higher excess mortality in urban settings.
conclusionOur findings demonstrate that excess mortality in LLMICs during the pandemic was substantial. However, estimates of excess mortality are uncertain due to relatively poor data. Understanding the drivers of excess mortality, will require more research using various techniques and data sources.
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