A new study estimates the number of lives lost in Russia as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and presents a novel methodology that will aid in improving our understanding of pandemics in the future.
The number of deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic must be determined in order to inform future epidemiological and policy decisions. However, obtaining a credible estimate is more difficult than it sounds because of partial or insufficient registration data, problems identifying the main cause of death, and issues locating indirect impacts.
This is especially true in Russia, where COVID-19 mortality estimates revealed a high level of uncertainty, with different figures published by various research both within and outside of Russia.Due to the country’s reported death rates being particularly high when compared to other regions of the world, it has also attracted interest from other countries. In a study that was just published in PLOS ONE, an international team of researchers led by IIASA carried out the most thorough examination of pandemic mortality in the nation to date in order to enhance estimates on the human cost of the epidemic in Russia.
Stuart Gietel-Basten, a researcher at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a coauthor of the study, says that although national statistics indicate that excess mortality in Russia may be among the highest in the world, there is a significant degree of regional variation that warrants further analysis. Such variety is essential to creating stronger public health policies to lessen COVID-19’s effects now as well as to repair and reconfigure healthcare systems when the epidemic is over.
The idea of “excess mortality,” which examines the discrepancy between the actual number of deaths and what would have been anticipated if there had been no pandemic, was applied by the researchers. Contrary to other metrics, excess mortality provides a considerably more thorough and trustworthy assessment by taking into account deaths that may have resulted from lockdowns, movement restrictions, postponed procedures, and other factors.
The researchers projected excess mortality for Russia and its regions for 2020 and 2021 using the most recent data made available by the Russian Federal State Statistics Service and assessed mortality by age, sex, and place of residence for 2020. The researchers calculated that the pandemic has claimed over one million lives in Russia during the past two years.
According to Sergei Scherbov, the study’s principal author and a researcher at the IIASA Population and Just Societies Program, “a lot of scholars in Russia and beyond have more or less identical figures.” However, because of the sophisticated technique and software that IIASA has created, we were able to make demographic forecasts for all regions, subdividing populations by gender, age, and urban or rural status. Our ability to construct a highly accurate estimate of the excess mortality from COVID-19 throughout Russia and its regions was made possible by this.
One of the study’s key results was the stark variation in death rates across the nation. At the regional level, excess deaths in 2021 varied from 27% to 52% of predicted deaths, with metropolitan areas generally performing worse. In addition to population density, the researchers hypothesized that socio-cultural, economic, and maybe even geographic disparities may also have played a role in the variances.
According to Dalkhat Ediev, study coauthor and researcher in the IIASA Population and Just Societies Program, “regions of the Northern Caucasus reporting high excess mortality are known for their tradition of elderly living in larger households of extended families together with their children and descendants.” Such a custom may have led to greater social exposure and, hence, greater losses.
The study also developed a brand-new metric known as the Mean Remaining Life Expectancy of the Deceased, which displays the average number of years lost by people whose deaths were among the excess deaths. They discovered that for all of Russia, the average person who passed away from the epidemic in 2020 would have lived an additional 14 years on average.
According to Scherbov, “This finding refutes the widely accepted notion that excess mortality during the pandemic period was concentrated among people with few years of life remaining—nnotably for females.”
In addition to assisting policymakers with future decisions about mitigation methods, the new and improved estimates represent a significant methodological advance that will allow us to have a greater understanding of pandemics in the future.
