Covid-19 resulted in an excess mortality of 95,000 deaths between March 2020 and December 2021.
France recorded an excess mortality of 95,000 deaths during the pandemic between March 2020 and December 2021, a figure nonetheless lower than the estimated death toll from Covid-19 because some “vulnerable individuals would have died even without the epidemic,” according to a study by Insee published on Thursday, May 19.
To arrive at this result, experts from the public institute determine the number of deaths “expected in the absence of an epidemic”—taking into account the population increase and aging and the trend of decreasing mortality risk at each age. Then, they compare this to the number of deaths actually recorded, for all causes.
In total, this calculated excess mortality reached +55,600 from March to December 2020, then +39,100 in 2021, which is almost +95,000 deaths in total. However, over the same period, the human toll of the Covid-19 epidemic was significantly higher: between 130,000 and 146,000 people are estimated to have been claimed by the virus according to different estimates.
This difference is explained by the fact that some of the Covid victims are “vulnerable” individuals whom demographers consider might have died from another cause (such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc.) even without the epidemic. This is what specialists refer to as the “harvesting effect.” Moreover, the epidemic also reduced other causes of death, such as road accidents, which were less frequent during lockdowns.
