Financial Times - Excess mortality during COVID-19 pandemic

This dataset contains excess mortality data for the period covering the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic and can be accessed here.

The data contains the excess mortality data for all known jurisdictions which publish all-cause mortality data meeting the following criteria:

  • daily, weekly or monthly level of granularity
  • includes equivalent historical data for at least one full year before 2020, and preferably at least five years (2015-2019)
  • includes data up to at least April 1, 2020

Most countries publish mortality data with a longer periodicity (typically quarterly or even annually), a longer publication lag time, or both. This sort of data is not suitable for ongoing analysis during an epidemic and is therefore not included here.

"Excess mortality" refers to the difference between deaths from all causes during the pandemic and the historic seasonal average. For many of the jurisdictions shown here, this figure is higher than the official Covid-19 fatalities that are published by national governments each day. While not all of these deaths are necessarily attributable to the disease, it does leave a number of unexplained deaths that suggests that the official figures of deaths attributed may significantly undercount the pandemic's impact.

The data has been gathered from national, regional or municipal agencies that collect death registrations and publish official mortality statistics. These original data were reshaped into a standardised format by Financial Times journalists to allow cross-national comparisons, and have been used to inform the FT’s reporting on the pandemic.

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Source https://data.humdata.org/dataset/financial-times-excess-mortality-during-covid-19-pandemic-data
Author HERA - Humanitarian Emergency Response Africa
Maintainer HERA - Humanitarian Emergency Response Africa
Last Updated September 7, 2022, 14:11 (SAST)
Created March 3, 2021, 11:17 (SAST)