Why the number of deaths has increased significantly recently

With 2,257 deaths in calendar week 51, more people died than in any other calendar week in 2022. This also exceeded the highest value in 2021, which was 2,201 deaths in calendar week 48,” said Statistics Austria Director General Tobias Thomas.

“In the last few weeks of 2022 there was again a significant increase in deaths in Austria after the number of deaths in autumn 2022 was below the level of the previous year,” explained Thomas. A look at the individual calendar weeks shows that the number of deaths increased significantly, especially in the last three weeks of 2022. Less than 2,000 deaths were always registered between the 13th and 49th calendar week, there were 2,161 deaths in the 50th calendar week (12th to 18th December 2022) and in the 51st calendar week (19th to 25th December 2022) 2,257 and in the 52nd calendar week (December 26, 2022 to January 1, 2023) 2,226. This even slightly exceeded the maximum value for a single calendar week in 2021 (2,201 deaths in the 48th calendar week of 2021).

Influenza and Covid

The sharp increase in deaths coincides with the current wave of influenza, as shown by data from the Center for Virology at the Medical University of Vienna. In addition, thousands of new corona infections are still being registered every day. Compared to the five-year average of the same calendar weeks in the years before the start of the Corona Pandemic, i.e. in the years 2015 to 2019, according to Statistics Austria, 34.5 percent died in the 50th calendar week of 2022 and 36.5 percent in the 51st calendar week of 2022 and in the 52nd calendar week of 2022 by 28.3 percent more people.

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Around 92,000 deaths in the previous year

Calculated for the year as a whole, the number of deaths in 2022 was similar to that of the two previous years. According to the first preliminary results from Statistics Austria, around 91,600 deaths have been reported for January 1 to December 31, 2022. This number is at a similar level as in the first two pandemic years 2020 (91,599) and 2021 (91,962), but 10.5 percent above the five-year average before the start of the corona pandemic (2015-2019). In the coming weeks, the number of reported deaths in 2022 will increase slightly, as the registry offices continue to report deaths from the previous year. In addition, the present figure for 2022 does not include any deaths in the Austrian population that occurred abroad.

The number of corona deaths has fallen significantly

The persistently high mortality rate is also striking because the number of corona deaths fell significantly in the previous year. While AGES recorded 7,532 deaths after a corona infection in the first year of the pandemic in 2020 and 9,195 in 2021, there were only 4,746 in the previous year. However, overall mortality did not decrease. A certain increase in deaths would have been expected even without the corona pandemic – due to the increasing number of inhabitants and the aging population. However, the value expected by Statistics Austria before the pandemic for 2022 was only 85,427 deaths. This value has now been exceeded by 7.2 percent.

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