What should be the baseline when calculating excess mortality? New approaches suggest that we have underestimated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and previous winter peaks

• Main Authors: Vladimir M. Shkolnikov (Author), Ilya Klimkin (Author), Martin McKee (Author), Dmitri A. Jdanov (Author), Ainhoa Alustiza-Galarza (Author), László Németh (Author), Sergey A. Timonin (Author), Marília R. Nepomuceno (Author), Evgeny M. Andreev (Author), David A. Leon (Author)
• Format: Book
• Published: Elsevier, 2022-06-01T00:00:00Z.
• Subjects: article
• Online Access: Connect to this object online.

Excess mortality has been used to measure the impact of COVID-19 over time and across countries. But what baseline should be chosen? We propose two novel approaches: an alternative retrospective baseline derived from the lowest weekly death rates achieved in previous years and a within-year baseline...