Spiralling Deaths In Germany

Tuesday, 14 March 2023, 2:12 pm
Article: Keith Rankin

The four weeks ending 8 January 2023 have seen easily the most deaths in Germany of any fourweek period since 2015. A table of Germany's mortality peaks from 2015 features in my Evening Report analysis Germany’s Deadliest Weeks since World War Two?
 

The worst week within that bleak December was the week ending Christmas Day 2022, with 28,481 deaths. While it's hard to compare with pre-1990 years, due in part to the East Germany question, it may well be that the festive weeks last December had a greater percentage of excess deaths in Germany than any other since 1950.

Baseline weekly deaths for 2022 would have been just over 17,000. Therefore, winter-type illnesses have raised peak deaths at the end of 2022 to 65 percent above what they would have been in a normal non-winter week.
 

While the December 2022 statistic is remarkable, it seems that most Germans themselves are not aware of this. Many people suffering individual tragedies will typically not be aware when their 'micro' tragedy is part of a much bigger 'macro' tragedy. The best I can find on DW discussing the health situation in Germany last December is: Winter illnesses burden Germany's intensive care units, 17 Dec 2022. This DW story (23 Jan 2023) The impossible task of calculating global pandemic deaths, only looks at 2020 and 2021, and gives no commentary on the Germany chart included.

What is remarkable is that this latest winter toll comes very soon after three other periods of high peak mortality in 2022, listed in the Evening Report table as 'autumn wave', 'summer wave', and 'omicron wave'. So, from the Grim Reaper's point of view, the 'low-hanging-fruit' should already have passed.

These recent mortality waves compare unfavourably with the three 'classic' Covid19 death waves, each of which had weekly peaks in 2020. By 'classic' I mean the original 'Wuhan' coronavirus strain, before 'variants' and 'vaccinations' became a thing in 2021.

It is also noteworthy how high some of the pre-covid death peaks were. The 2017 influenza 'pandemic' (from late 2016 to early 2018) was particularly pronounced. (I use single-quote-marks, because this actual pandemic was never granted pandemic-status by the World Health Organisation.) Germany's two peaks for this influenza pandemic were in February 2017 and March 2018. We also note a particularly bad season of epidemic influenza in early 2015.

Refer to my Death Spikes and Covid Dissonance? Examples of Germany and Denmark for charts recently published, comparing Germany's excess deaths with those of its neighbour, Denmark. The December 2022 mortality peak is reproduced to some extent in most (but not some eastern) European Union countries, and in the United Kingdom and United States. However, Germany's year-of-death in 2022 is probably the most dramatic. (One other country which appears to have an equally problematic mortality, maybe worse, in 2022 is South Korea. I wait in hope for the eventual publication of South Korea's complete dataset.)

My analysis article in Evening Report also includes a chart showing published estimates of 'excess deaths by age' in Germany (from 2020). That chart shows 'excess deaths' – as distinct from total deaths – for Germany, by age group.
 

Germany's demographics are unusual (but maybe not unusually unusual) on account of World War Two fertility disruptions. Germany shows disturbingly high rates of pandemic death in 2021 and 2022 for its baby-boomers (people aged 65-74). (It should be noted that Covid19 deaths have tended to peak from November to January, whereas epidemic influenza deaths tended to peak in February or March. Thus the big reductions in excess deaths each February and March are mainly due to high death-norms set by pre-covid influenzas.)

Countries regarded as having pursued the best anti-Covid19 public health policies in 2020 have not had a good 2022. Germany is one of those countries. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore and China are others. So are Australia and New Zealand. Once having acknowledged their overall 2022 death statistics for what they are, terrible, the question is whether the problems of 2022 in those and other countries will extend into 2023. While my hunch is that new Covid19 vaccinations could make a difference, in 2023 at least, I am concerned that societies as we know them may be passing a demographic turning point and that life expectancies have already begun to decline from their peaks, and may continue to decline for decades.

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

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Keith Rankin

Political Economist, Scoop Columnist

Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s.

Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like.

Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.

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