Economy 12 January 2021, 3:55pm

1-month average death toll matches total number of coronavirus fatalities in Hungary

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The coronavirus pandemic has reached a psychological level in Hungary, as the number of official COVID-19 deaths has reached the average number of deaths per month.

According to official data, 10,853 Hungarians died of coronavirus-related diseases as of Monday since the outbreak in the spring of 2020. They are the ones that had positive COVID-19 tests at the time of their death. The excess mortality statistics only give us an idea of how many people still die in relation to coronavirus, but who are not included in the official stats for some reason, e.g. they do not have a positive test. Hence, there could actually be more people that lose their lives due to the pandemic. But this is no unique, it happens everywhere in the world where masses are infected by the virus.

Let's see how COVID-19 deaths relate to mortality on a national level, according to official figures. Between 2015 and 2019, 10,820 people died per month on average. This number includes everyone that died of natural causes (old age or illness) or was the victim of an accident, murder or committed suicide. The monthly death toll tends to be lower than the average during summer months and higher during the winter, mainly due to the seasonal flu epidemic.

In other words, the number of people that have officially died of coronavirus-related diseases since the outbreak in the spring of 2020 reached the average number of people that die every year in Hungary.

The big question is whether 10,853 would have died even if they do not contract coronavirus. And the answer is that no, most of them would probably still be alive now.

The orange line shows the number of COVID-19 victims per week in 2020 and the columns show how many more (or less) people died on that week relative to the same week of 2019.

In the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic, the correlation between COVID-19 deaths and excess mortality is extremely high. So, if those that have died of coronavirus-related diseases since the autumn had not contracted the virus, the death stats for the October-December period would be the same as in 2019, i.e. there would be no major excess mortality. As you can see, this was the case in the summer, the weekly number of deaths matched the base period's data.

This chart is the one that shows that excess mortality in the second wave is higher than the number of those that officially died in coronavirus-related diseases or complications. On certain weeks, 700 COVID-19 deaths came together with excess mortality of nearly 1,500. This can mean two things:

either more Hungarians fall victim to COVID-19 than how many are detected by authorities;
or the pandemic puts such immense pressure on hospitals that other patients do not get treated at all or not as well as they would normally be.

The only question remaining is how come the total number of deaths recorded in January-November 2020 is not higher by the number of COVID-19 deaths? (We still don't have all the date for December.) It is because the influenza epidemic in 2019-2020 was a lot milder than in the preceding year therefore a lot fewer people died in the first few months of 2020 (week 1 to 9 on the chart) than in the sam period of 2019. This is a drag on the first-half statistics which obviously affects the whole year.