Reports of deaths are an exaggeration: German (PCR-test-positive) fatality counts during the SARS-CoV-2 era in the context of all-cause mortality

Abstract

AbstractAs of March 2020, counts of SARS-CoV-2-related (‘CoViD-19’) deaths have been key numbers for justifying severe political, social, and economical measures put into action by authorities world-wide. A particular focus thereby was the concomitant excess mortality (EM), i.e. fatalities above the normally expected all-cause mortality (AM). Recent reports and studies, inter alia by the WHO, estimated the SARS-CoV-2-related EM in Germany between 2020 and 2021 as high as 200,000. In this study, we attempt to scrutinise these numbers by putting them into the context of German AM since the year 2000.To this end, we propose two straightforward, low-parametric models to estimate German AM, and thus EM, for the years 2020 and 2021 as well as the flu seasons 2020/21 and 2021/22. Additionally, we give a forecast of the AM expected in 2022. After having derived age-cohort-specific mortality rates out of historical data, weighted with their corresponding demographic proportion, EM is obtained by subtracting (model-)calculated AM counts from observed ones. For Germany, we find even an overall negative EM (‘under-mortality’) of about -18,500 for the year 2020, and a minor positive EM of about 7,000 for 2021, unveiling that officially communicated EM numbers are a great exaggeration. Further, putting CoViD-19 “cases” (defined by positive PCR test outcomes) and their related death counts into the context of AM, we are able to estimate how many Germans have dieddue torather thanwithCoViD-19; an analysis not provided by the appropriate authority, the RKI. Thereby, varying governmental PCR test strategies are shown to heavily obscure reliable estimations of SARS-CoV-2-related EM, particularly within the second year of the proclaimed pandemic.