In 2020 there were 123 thousand deaths! Worst number in the last 99 years

The COVID-19 pandemic and the impact on other pathologies have significantly altered the annual number of deaths in our country. In order to have identical figures to the number of deaths in the last year, it is necessary to go back to 1920, the year of the Spanish pandemic.

The year 2020 ended with 123 thousand deaths and a good part was due to COVID-19.

eVM: the death watch platform
You are probably not aware of the eVM platform (real-time mortality surveillance system that analyzes death certificates).  This service fundamentally serves to allow the articulation of the entities involved in the death certification process and aims to dematerialize death certificates, the statistical treatment of causes of death, among other important data.  The service shows deaths in real time.
The online tool allows anyone to know some of the causes of death, such as traffic or work accidents, suicides, homicides or natural causes;  but the specific data surrounding the deaths (location, identity, names of the doctors who sign the document) are only accessible to doctors in the analysis center of the Directorate General of Health (DGS).
According to eVM data of January 1, it is possible to determine that 123,667 people died in Portugal last year.  The newspaper says that more than half of the excess total mortality is due to COVID-19, reveals Jornal de Notícias.

According to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), in 1920 there were 144 thousand deaths in Portugal.  In 1918, 253 thousand people died in Portugal and in 1919 there were more than 154 thousand.
COVID-19 accounts for about half of the total excess mortality.  Analyzing the data from 1960 (when it began to be registered by the INE), until 2020 the worst year (the most recent) had been 2018, with 113,051 deaths.  At that time, the highest number of deaths was explained by the aging of the population and a heat wave, reveals the newspaper.  Now, it is due to the pandemic but also to the so-called collateral deaths (due to lack of timely assistance).
On the first day of 2021, 422 deaths were recorded.
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