Contextualizing the Global Burden of COVID-19 Pandemic. A Historical and Geographical Exploration of Excess Mortality in France, 1901-2022.

Florian Bonnet , Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Carlo Giovanni Camarda, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

In this paper, we propose (1) to evaluate the global burden of COVID-19 pandemic in France in 2020 and 2021 at the finest geographic level used by Eurostat in the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics, and (2) to compare this burden with other mortality crises which occurred during the 20th and 21st centuries. We leverage an extensive dataset comprising a lengthy time series of mortality data sourced from reliable records, stratified by age-groups and gender, for nearly 90 French départements. Our analytical approach involves modeling this dataset using a non-parametric approach (P - splines) within a Composite Link Model framework, while intentionally excluding years that are unequivocally identified as crises in relevant literature. The impact and burden of each crisis are subsequently assessed by computing age-specific differences between observed mortality rates and those predicted by our models. While our approach allows for the computation of a wide range of demographic indicators to evaluate the impact of each crisis, we focus on results for life expectancy at birth (e0) and at age 65 (e65). Our results reveal geographic hot spots for each crisis as well as differences in magnitude between crises. We plan to extend these results to the period 1872-1900, compute confidences intervals around our excess mortality measures, and endogenize the choice of crisis years on the basis of our modeling

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 Presented in Session 117. Flash Session - Changing Mortality Patterns over Time and Space