Mortality surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic

摘要

During an epidemic, rapid mortality surveillance provides essential information to formulate an evidence-based response. Weekly counts of deaths are a key indicator of overall epidemic impact and trajectory. Enumeration of all deaths, when compared to historically expected mortality, produces a picture of excess death, capturing both the direct burden of the epidemic and its indirect mortality burden, caused by disruptions to the access, use and provision of health-care services. Such actionable public health intelligence can overcome the ambiguities of just measuring cases and deaths linked to the infectious disease causing the epidemic. Measuring excess death would therefore be useful in the countries’ response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.