You are currently viewing No excess mortality data from COVID-19 in Denmark: data as of 12th April 2020

No excess mortality data from COVID-19 in Denmark: data as of 12th April 2020

I wrote to the lead editor of the Danish Statistics Agency on mortality data (Dorthe Larsen) on the 14th April to ask why their public mortality database is not up to date (data ends in 2019). I told her I wanted to look for evidence of excess mortality from COVID-19, and sent her an example of this based on UK data. To her credit, not only did she reply the same week (17th Friday), saying the data are now public for 2020, but also they issued a press release saying that there wasn’t any excess mortality. Good speed on important information! Danish media are all running the story today (e.g. Berlingske, Jyllands-Posten, Ekstrabladet).

What DST didn’t do was provide some good plots of the data in comparison with prior years, but I have done so. Here’s the plots:

Details are on Rpubs as usual: https://rpubs.com/EmilOWK/excess_mortality_Denmark

PS. If someone knows how to make LOESS smoother than the above, let me know. I already tried the smallest value of span possible, and it still isn’t smooth enough to handle the daily death data properly. Specifically, the 2013 and 2018 daily deaths are way above the smoothed line.