The coronavirus is raging, but they die less than before the epidemic, why?

Of the national and international coronavirus epidemic data, the “most non-coronavirus-related” statistics are generally considered the most reliable: excess mortality. The indicator indicates how many more (or fewer) people died in the weeks of the epidemic than in the same period of the year before the epidemic. The excess death rate is considered a lot because it simply overlooks the issues of who is considered dead in a coronavirus, how many infected people do we find, whether they all get tested in hospitals, etc. Instead, it simply compares the coronavirus death period to deaths without epidemics.

The excess mortality processes in Hungary are clear, as shown in the figure below. According to this, at the beginning of 2020, fewer people died in Hungary before the epidemic than in previous years, the main reason for which is the weaker-than-average influenza pandemic. The spring wave of the epidemic did not bring many deaths due to fast and strong closings, so we could see the usual demographic trends through the fall. Then in the fall, the second wave brought sad developments, the death toll significantly exceeded that at the time. In fact, we suffered all the serious losses from the epidemic in 15 weeks. After that, however, weekly deaths began to drop rapidly and fell below the multi-year average.

If we compare the excess mortality with the number of official deaths related to the coronavirus, we can make more interesting findings. As can be seen in the figure below, the two indicators do not match perfectly, and there are even seemingly inexplicable differences between them.