Crises such as Hurricane Maria and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have revealed that untimely reporting of the death toll results in inadequate interventions, impacts communication, and fuels distrust on response agencies. Delays in establishing mortality are due to the contested definition of deaths attributable to a disaster and lack of rapid collection of vital statistics data from inadequate health system infrastructure. Readily available death counts, combined with geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic data, can serve as a baseline to build a continuous mortality surveillance system. In an emergency setting, real-time Total, All-cause, Excess Mortality (TEM) can be a critical tool, granting authorities timely information ensuring a targeted response and reduce disaster impact. TEM measurement can identify spikes in mortality, including geographic disparities and disproportionate deaths in vulnerable populations. This study recommends that measuring total, all-cause, excess mortality as a first line of response should become the global standard for measuring disaster impact.

We estimate the delay-adjusted all-cause excess deaths across 53 US jurisdictions. Using provisional data collected from September through December 2020, we first identify a common mean reporting delay of 2.8 weeks, whereas four jurisdictions have prolonged reporting delays compared to the others: Connecticut (mean 5.8 weeks), North Carolina (mean 10.4 weeks), Puerto Rico (mean 4.7 weeks) and West Virginia (mean 5.5 weeks). After adjusting for reporting delays, we estimate the percent change in all-cause excess mortality from March to December 2020 with range from 0.2 to 3.6 in Hawaii to 58.4 to 62.4 in New York City. Comparing the March–December with September–December 2020 periods, the highest increases in excess mortality are observed in South Dakota (36.9–54.0), North Dakota (33.9–50.7) and Missouri (27.8–33.9). Our findings indicate that analysis of provisional data requires caution in interpreting the death counts in recent weeks, while one needs also to account for heterogeneity in reporting delays of excess deaths among US jurisdictions.

The global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has altered entire nations and their health systems. The greatest impact of the pandemic has been seen among vulnerable populations, such as those with comorbidities like heart diseases, kidney failure, obesity, or those with worse health determinants such as unemployment and poverty. In the current study, we are proposing previous exposure to fine-grained volcanic ashes as a risk factor for developing COVID-19. Based on several previous studies it has been known since the mid 1980s of the past century that volcanic ash is most likely an accelerating factor to suffer from different types of cancer, including lung or thyroid cancer. Our study postulates, that people who are most likely to be infected during a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) widespread wave will be those with comorbidities that are related to previous exposure to volcanic ashes. We have explored 8703 satellite images from the past 21 y of available data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) database and correlated them with the data from the national institute of health statistics in Ecuador. Additionally, we provide more realistic numbers of fatalities due to the virus based on excess mortality data of 2020-2021, when compared with previous years. This study would be a very first of its kind combining social and spatial distribution of COVID-19 infections and volcanic ash distribution. The results and implications of our study will also help countries to identify such aforementioned vulnerable parts of the society, if the given geodynamic and volcanic settings are similar.

To take stock of the human toll resulting from racial inequality in the United States, we estimate the number of excess deaths that accumulated among African Americans over the twentieth century as a result of the enduring racial gap in mortality rates. We assemble a wide array of demographic and vital statistics data for all years since 1900 to calculate the number of Black deaths in each half-decade that occurred in excess of what would be projected if Blacks had experienced the same gender- and age-specific mortality rates as Whites. We estimate that there were almost 7.7 million excess deaths among African Americans from 1900 through 1999. Those deaths comprised over 40% of all African American deaths over the century.

Excess deaths were highest in the early decades (peaking in 1925–1934), but the only period of sustained decline was 1935–1949. Subsequent reductions in excess deaths were relatively modest and unstable, and in the last decade of the century the percentage of Blacks’ deaths that were excess returned to levels as high as in the first decade. That trajectory is less positive than the trajectory for the racial gap in life expectancy over the century.

Excess deaths fell disproportionately among the young in the early twentieth century, but in the succeeding decades they progressively hit harder among older African Americans, many of them in the prime of life when their economic and social pursuits were vital to their families and communities. Excess deaths were also especially heavy among Black women for most of the century.

We conclude by discussing the social and policy implications of the excess deaths. We assess trends in the early twenty-first century as we consider the political challenges involved in tackling the continuing excess death toll.

There are no studies and only limited data that compare the difference in mortality between twins and singletons in the Arab world. We studied the survival of 306,966 children, including 9,280 twins, over the period 1970–2013 in six Arab countries (Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Mauritania, Sudan and Tunisia) based on the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) database. With the use of relative survival models, we estimated the mortality of twins relative to singletons by including socioeconomic and demographic variables. This study confirms the results of previous studies on the excess risk of death of twins compared to singletons. There is evidence that excess mortality decreases with follow-up; in addition, male twins have a higher risk of death compared to females for all countries except Tunisia. Wealth index and education levels of women are factors that influence the risk of mortality. It is recommended that these findings are considered when performing future health and population strategies in these Arab countries.

Background: Reports that death notices in the Times-Picayune, the New Orleans daily newspaper, increased dramatically in 2006 prompted local health officials to determine whether death notice surveillance could serve as a valid alternative means to confirm suspicions of excess mortality requiring immediate preventive actions and intervention.

Methods: Monthly totals of death notices from the Times-Picayune were used to obtain frequency and proportion of deaths from January to June 2006. To validate this methodology the authors compared 2002 to 2003 monthly death frequency and proportions between death notices and top 10 causes of death from state vital statistics.

Results: A significant (47%) increase in proportion of deaths was seen compared with the known baseline population. From January to June 2006, there were on average 1317 deaths notices per month for a mortality rate of 91.37 deaths per 100,000 population, compared with a 2002–2004 average of 924 deaths per month for a mortality rate of 62.17 deaths per 100,000 population. Differences between 2002 and 2003 death notices and top 10 causes of death were insignificant and had high correlation.

Discussion: Death notices from local daily newspaper sources may serve as an alternative source of mortality information. Problems with delayed reporting, timely analysis, and interoperability between state and local health departments may be solved by the implementation of electronic death registration. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2007;1:15–20)

Influenza can be a serious, sometimes deadly, disease, especially for people in high-risk groups such as the elderly and patients with underlying, severe disease. In this paper we estimated the influenza-related excess mortality in Norway for 1975–2004, comparing it with dominant virus types and estimates of the reproduction number. Analysis was done using Poisson regression, explaining the weekly all-cause mortality by rates of reported influenza-like illness, together with markers for seasonal and year-to-year variation. The estimated excess mortality was the difference between the observed and predicted mortality, removing the influenza contribution from the prediction. We estimated the overall influenza-related excess mortality as 910 deaths per season, or 2·08% of the overall deaths. Age-grouped analyses indicated that the major part of the excess mortality occurred in the ⩾65 years age group, but that there was also a significant contribution to mortality in the 0–4 years age group. Estimates of the reproduction number R, ranged from about 1 to 1·69.

Historical studies of influenza pandemics can provide insight into transmission and mortality patterns, and may aid in planning for a future pandemic. Here, we analyse historical vital statistics and quantify the age-specific mortality patterns associated with the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic in Japan, USA, and UK. All three countries showed highly elevated mortality risk in young adults relative to surrounding non-pandemic years. By contrast, the risk of death was low in the very young and very old. In Japan, the overall mortality impact was not limited to winter 1918–1919, and continued during winter 1919–1920. Mortality impact varied as much as threefold across the 47 Japanese prefectures, and differences in baseline mortality, population demographics, and density explained a small fraction of these variations. Our study highlights important geographical variations in timing and mortality impact of historical pandemics, in particular between the Eastern and Western hemispheres. In a future pandemic, vaccination in one region could save lives even months after the emergence of a pandemic virus in another region.

Les statistiques sur les décès dans les hôpitaux psychiatriques existant actuellement en France ne permettent pas de calculer avec précision la mortalité des malades mentaux hospitalisés car on ne dispose pas du nombre de sujets pris en charge au cours d’une année.

Toutefois, à partir des durées de séjour, à l’aide de la méthode des personnes-années, on peut reconstituer une estimation satisfaisante de la population prise en charge, soit 96 750 patients. L’effectif théorique de population ainsi calculé est réparti selon la distribution observée par sexe et par âge des malades existants au 31 décembre.

Le nombre des décès observés par sexe et groupe d’âge est comparé aux décès que l’on aurait eus si les taux de mortalité de la population générale française de 1982 (milieu de l’année) avaient été appliqués aux effectifs de patients hospitalisés du même sexe et du même groupe d’âge. Il ressort de cette comparaison que la mortalité des malades hospitalisés est globalement trois fois plus élevée que celle de la population générale. Cette surmortalité est plus accentuée encore pour les groupes d’âges jeunes, surtout chez les femmes.