Mexico reports more than 320,000 excess deaths in 2020

Mexico City, Oct 28 (EFE).- More than 43 percent of the record 1.08 million deaths recorded in Mexico last year qualify as “excess deaths” under the criteria used by the regional branch of the World Health Organization, the Inegi statistics agency said Thursday.

“Based on the methodology of the OPS (Pan American Health Organization) and information from the period 2015-2019, a total of 749,496 deaths were expected in Mexico in 2020 and 1,086,417 occurred, an excess of mortality from all causes of 326,921, equivalent to 43.6 percent,” Inegi chief Julio A. Santaella wrote on Twitter.

The mortality rate was 86 for every 100,000 inhabitants, an increase of 27 over 2019.

“The increase in registered deaths coincides with the start of the period of the Covid-19 pandemic,” Inegi said.

In 2011, when Inegi began tracking mortality, 590,693 deaths were registered, and the number gradually increased to 747,784 in 2019.

Deaths attributed to illness grew last year to more than 1 million, or 92.4 percent of the total, while homicides and accidents together accounted for the bulk of the remaining 7.6 percent.

Homicide was the sixth-leading cause of death for Mexican men in 2020. Among illnesses, the biggest killers were heart ailments (20.1 percent), Covid-19 (18.4 percent) and diabetes (13.9 percent).

Inegi’s figures indicate that coronavirus claimed 200,256 lives in Mexico in 2020, while the government’s official Covid-19 death toll for last year as 126,507.

The cumulative pandemic death toll to date in Mexico stands at 287,000, according to the data base maintained by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. EFE mqb/dr