Excess Death in Europe 2020 and 2021

Government interventions caused more excess death in Western Europe and life expectancy is the only determinant factor of excess death in Eastern Europe. Vaccines made no significant impact.

COVID hit Western Europe (spring 2020) before Eastern Europe (autumn 2020) so it makes sense to analyse them separately.

In Western Europe, Belgium suffered the most excess death between April and December 2020 with 1,536 excess deaths per million population.

Lichtenstein, Italy, Spain and the UK were not far behind, ranging between 1,370 and 1,214 respectively. The Faeroe Islands, Iceland, Norway and Denmark had the lowest excess deaths.

You could be forgiven for thinking physical geography played a major part but let’s examine the impact of COVID policy all-the-same.

Taking the sum of the stringency index to represent the magnitude of government intervention, plotted against the excess death, we actually get a positive coefficient, suggesting that the more stringent the interventions, the worse the outcome in terms of all-cause mortality. Oh, and with a p-value of 0.4%, it is statistically significant too. Well, that’s not a good start.

I controlled for life expectancy too but it made no significant difference.

In 2021, the year of the vaccine, with a p-value of 26.8%, the vaccine had no significant impact on all-cause mortality and again introducing life expectancy made no difference either. Fortunate really, given that the coefficient was actually positive, i.e. more vaccination = more death.

N.B. This does not necessarily rule out the possibility that the vaccine is causing excess death, it only addresses the relative impact. Given that all the Western European nations have surpassed the 65% threshold, it could simply mean that above a certain point, it makes little additional difference.

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In Eastern Europe, despite having much less COVID in 2020, the excess deaths were higher than in the west. In that case, you could be forgiven for thinking that the interventions alone accounted for much of the excess death, probably more than COVID itself.

Belarus, Russia, Bulgaria and Serbia all had excess death around the 2,600 per million mark.

This time stringency was insignificant with a p-value of 51.7%. Conversely, life expectancy was the a strong determinant, with a negative correlation and a statistically significant p-value of 2.1%. Perhaps this is indicative of the quality of healthcare in these countries?

In 2021, the picture got much bleaker for Eastern Europe as they battled the real surge of COVID against a backdrop of ill-effects of government interventions plus the impact of mass COVID vaccination.

Bulgaria and Serbia were even harder hit with between 6k and 5k deaths per million respectively. Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine all had more than 3k excess deaths per million.

But would it have been much worse without the vaccine??

At first blush, it certainly seems so. The coefficient is negative and the p-value is only 0.9% which would indicate that the vaccine was beneficial in terms of reducing all-cause mortality and was statistically significant.

However, when we introduce life expectancy once more, we observe that we are only seeing the correlation between quality of healthcare (proxied from life expectancy) and the vaccination rate. In other words, those countries with a better healthcare system administered more vaccines but the vaccine was not responsible for the lower excess death.

When life expectancy is introduced to the regression model, the vaccination rate loses all significance and is entirely replaced by life expectancy with a p-value of 3.8%. It’s like they give with one hand and take away with the other.