Medical Industry

What we know What we wonder

● Increase in excess mortality rate ● What is the excess mortality?

● To face a shortage of medical ● How were the vaccines made

resources including hospital for covid 19?
beds and medical equipment

● Increasing expenses in medical ● How excess mortality

equipment measured

Covid 19’s Impact on the Medical

Industry

What is excess
mortality?

In epidemiology, excess deaths

or mortality is a measure of the
increase in the number of
deaths during a period or in a
certain group compared to the
expected value or statistical
trend during a reference period
or in a reference population. It
may typically be measured in
percentage points or in the
number of deaths per time unit.
A short period of excess mortality that is followed by a compensating period of mortality deficit is
quite common and is also known as "harvesting". A mortality deficit in a particular period can be
caused by deaths displaced to an earlier time or deaths displaced to a future.

Mortality displacement is the occurrence of deaths at an earlier time than they would have
otherwise occurred, meaning the deaths are displaced from the future into the present, resulting
in a changed life expectancy.

As opposed to several registered fatalities of a certain death cause, such as a specific virus,
temporary excess mortality, and mortality displacement, these measures reflect many combined
causes. The dominant reason may be events such as heat waves, cold spells, epidemics and
pandemics, famine, or war, and it allows for estimates of the mortality caused by those events
combined with other indirect health effects. Excess mortality is also studied for certain groups,
such as the elderly, men, the unemployed, etc.

How were the vaccines made for covid 19?

Different COVID-19 vaccines use different technologies, or “platforms”. The most conventional
one is the inactivated vaccine. It contains dead viruses. Because the virus is still whole, it has all
of the parts, in the correct shape, that can stimulate a response from the immune system – what
we call the antigens. The immune response can be against multiple antigens.
The Chinese vaccines – from Sinovac and Sinopharm – are the main ones using this platform.
It’s a great technology, it works for some human and veterinary vaccines. The same approach
was used for seasonal flu vaccines some years ago.
Then there are the viral-vectored vaccines, such as the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine and the
Sputnik V vaccine from Russia’s Gamaleya Institute. This is where you take a harmless virus,
such as a virus that gives you a cold, and you alter it so that it can infect one cell, but can’t
reproduce and go on to infect other cells.
You then get that virus to carry the gene for a protein of interest, such as the spike protein of
SARS-CoV-2, with the DNA sequence for the spike protein combined into the virus’s DNA. The
virus is thus a vehicle for bringing the genetic instructions on how to make the spike.

How is excess mortality measured?

The analysis adjusted for age, marital status, education, chronic conditions, smoking,
and physical exercise earlier in life. The study found a twofold increase in the risk of
death in impaired–active groups and a three times greater risk in impaired–sedentary
groups than in mobile–active groups. We use an estimate produced by Ariel Karlinsky
and Dmitry Kobak as part of their World Mortality Dataset (WMD). To produce this
estimate, they first fit a regression model for each region using historical deaths data
from 2015–2019. They then use the model to project the number of deaths we might
normally have expected in 2020–2023. Their model can capture both seasonal variation
and year-to-year trends in mortality.
Previously we used a different expected deaths baseline: the average number of deaths
over the years 2015–2019. We made this change because using the five-year average
has an important limitation — it does not account for year-to-year trends in mortality and
thus can misestimate excess mortality. The WMD projection, on the other hand, does
not suffer from this limitation because it accounts for these year-to-year trends. Our
charts using the five-year average are still accessible in the links in the sections below.

Conclusion

Excess deaths, often known as mortality, are a measure in the epidemiology of the rise in
fatalities within a group or during a period of time relative to the statistical trend or expected
value within a reference population or period. Usually, it is expressed as a percentage point or
as the number of deaths in one unit of time.
"Harvesting" is another term for the common occurrence of a brief time of excess mortality
followed by a compensatory period of mortality shortfall. Deaths that are shifted to a later date
or an earlier time can result in a mortality deficit in a given period.
The incidence of fatalities earlier than they otherwise would have, or mortality displacement,
means