Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Ukrainian mortality, 2020-2021

Abstract

The mortality impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ukraine has remained incomplete. We estimated excess deaths associated with the pandemic in Ukraine during 2020 and 2021. Excess deaths may be attributed directly to SARS-CoV-2 infection or indirectly to deaths associated with social and economic upheavals resulting from the pandemic. Data on all deaths registered in government-controlled Ukraine from 2016-2021 (N = 3,657,475) were utilized. Using a model-based approach, we predicted monthly excess deaths in 2020 and 2021. We estimated 47,578 excess deaths in 2020 as a whole (7.71% of all recorded deaths). This figure reflects both positive (higher than expected) excess deaths from June-December and negative (lower than expected) deaths in January and March-May. From June-December 2020, we estimated 59,363 excess deaths (15.75% of all recorded deaths in those months). In 2021, we estimated 150,049 excess deaths (21.01% of all recorded deaths). Positive excess deaths were detected across age groups even groups younger than 40 years. The number of excess deaths exceeded that of deaths with COVID-19 coded on the death certificate by more than two-fold in 2020, but that difference narrowed in 2021. We furthermore provide provisional estimates of the effect of low vaccine coverage on excess deaths in 2021 drawing from European cross-national evidence and provisional estimates of the hypothetical evolution of the pandemic in 2022 to serve as a rough basis for future studies analyzing the joint impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion on Ukrainian demography.

Fig 1. Number of deaths per 100,000 population by calendar month and year in government-controlled Ukraine, all ages and both sexes combined; 2016–2021.

Population size as of January 1 of calendar year.

Fig 2

Percent excess deaths and COVID-19 coded deaths by age group in (a) 2020 and (b) 2021. Estimates for 2020 include only months that had positive excess deaths across all ages (June-December).

Fig 3

Heat maps of percent excess deaths by region and calendar year in (a) 2020 and (b) 2021. Data for Luhansk and Donetsk reflect only those parts of these regions that were controlled by the Ukrainian government during these years. Percent excess deaths were from authors’ analysis of mortality data from the State Statistics Service of Ukraine. Basemaps obtained from Cartography Vectors (https://cartographyvectors.com/map/1530-ukraine-with-regions). Python version 3.11.1 was used to construct heat map shading.