More than 4000 corona deaths last year – but the mystery of the excess mortality remains

Only in the Swiss worry barometer does the corona pandemic score low. In a current Moneyland health care survey, the coronavirus was only ranked 38th among Switzerland’s top concerns. Although hidden waves have been raging through the country since the end of all measures in the spring of 2022, the virus has become less dangerous thanks to vaccination and extra immunity from SARS-CoV-2 infections.

At least for the majority of people: According to the latest provisional cause of death statistics from the Federal Statistics Office (FSO) for 2022, 4029 Swiss died of Corona last year. Although that is significantly less than in the first two years of the pandemic, according to these statistics, the virus is still the leading cause with more than 330 deaths per month. It is mainly the elderly who will have died from Corona in 2022: 94 percent were older than 65 years, 55 percent even older than 85 years.

“The virus didn’t just stop circulating in 2022,” Huldrych Günthard, senior physician at the Infectious Diseases Clinic at Zurich University Hospital, explained in an interview with Watson about the latest BFS numbers. “Although people in intensive care hardly died from Corona, there were still many infections. There was simply less testing because people noticed that the disease was much less severe and somehow they were fed up. As the wastewater monitoring shows, for example, we had a major corona wave in the summer.”

This is also reflected in the FSO’s cause of death statistics. More Swiss died in June, July and August last year than in the first two years of the pandemic. However, infectiologist Günthard warns of possible biases: “A large proportion of people died last summer not directly, but indirectly from Covid.” Because the BFS’s cause-of-death statistics are based on information on the cause-of-death statement, which is completed by a physician.

“Many older people are polymorbid,” explains Günthard. This means that they suffer from several diseases at the same time. “We had a heat wave in the summer. In the fall and winter, the violent spate of respiratory disease caused by RS viruses and flu caused even more deaths. And then there’s Covid.” It was ultimately difficult to estimate what the main cause of death was in any case.

The number of actual Covid deaths is therefore likely to be slightly lower than the FSO’s cause of death statistics. This is astonishing – especially when you consider the excess mortality in Switzerland in 2022. Last year it was still around 10 percent. That means that more than 6,600 more people died than expected.

In the first two years of the pandemic, 2020 and 2021, the excess mortality in Switzerland was largely explained by the consequences of the coronavirus. In 2022 this is no longer possible. “We cannot fully explain the high excess mortality in 2022 at the moment,” says Günthard. “But some of it is definitely due to Covid.”

One theory is currently that the coronavirus causes longer-term damage to health and that people did not die directly from the coronavirus, but from the organ damage caused by the virus, in particular from cardiovascular disease. “I don’t rule that out,” says Günthard. “However, much is still unclear and causality is difficult to prove. Hopefully future studies can solve the mystery.”

The Covid vaccination is not responsible for the high excess mortality in 2022. The BFS recorded only six deaths in 2022 due to “adverse side effects from the use of Covid 19 vaccines”. These are tragic, but cannot explain the extra mortality across Switzerland. This coincides with Günthard’s experience: “Because of the Covid vaccination, we hardly had any referrals last year, neither inpatient nor outpatient. So I don’t think it matters.”