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In December 2022, the German Pension Insurance announced an estimated surplus of €2.1 billion for the past year. President Roßbach partly explained this balance was due to the 'Corona Pandemic, which has led to an increase in mortality, especially among older people'. Here, the author takes a closer look at the demographics behind that statement and calculates the pandemic-related population deficit among ages 65 and above across Europe. The article also looks at population aging under conditions of continuously reduced life expectancy.

Early evidence demonstrates that the fertility response to the COVID-19 pandemic has varied across European countries. Yet, prior research indicates that fertility responses to disasters are often localized sub-nationally. Moreover, SARS-CoV-2 incidence, economic pandemic impacts, and the affectedness by virus containment measures varied subnationally across Europe during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sub-national variation in the fertility response seems therefore possible. We conducted a rigorous data collection effort in 28 European countries (equaling 241 European sub-national regions) and used cutting-edge forecasting methods to assess sub-national variation in the fertility response to the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. While we find sub-national variation, our results reveal that the fertility response to the pandemic was dominated by the country level, with Southern European countries witnessing more negative fertility response to the early pandemic than Northern Europe. Variance decomposition even indicates a ‘nationalization’ of birth rates during the winter months of 2020, as the within- country variance in fertility declined and between-country variance increased. Nonetheless, highly urbanized areas in Europe experienced significantly steeper fertility declines as a response to the beginning of the pandemic, which is partly explained by their higher SARSCoV-2 incidence rates. SARS-CoV-2 incidence rates emerged as another important predictor of the fertility response more broadly. Higher incidences were associated with steeper fertility declines across the regions. Overall, country-level estimates represent fertility responses to the COVID-19 pandemic generally well, but the regional dimension provides additional important insight into how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted fertility.

A global demographic database of COVID-19 cases, deaths, tests, and vaccines as reported by statistical agencies, standardized and in harmonized age groups. You can find the paper describing the database, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, here: https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyab027 This project is currently in development, stay tuned for documentation. You can get preliminary output in 5 and 10-year age groups in the /Data folder. This contains columns for Cases, Deaths, and Tests (just a few populations report Tests bya ge)). More data can be found in the unharmonized input database. The team (so far), alphabetical by last name: José Manuel Aburto, Enrique Acosta, Diego Alburez-Gutiérrez, Anna Altová, Ainhoa Alustiza, Ugofilippo Basellini, Simona Bignami, Kirstin Bobrow, Didier Breton, Eungang Choi, Jorge Cimentada, Gonzalo De Armas, Emanuele Del Fava, Alicia Delgado, Viorela Diaconu, Jessica Donzowa, Christian Dudel, Manal K. Elzalabany, Vanessa Sophie Ernst, Antonia Fröhlich, Alain Gagnon, Mariana García Cristómo, Víctor M. García-Guerrero, Armando González-Díaz, Mahmoud Hassan, Irwin Hecker, Dana Jose, Maxi S. Kniffka, Dagnon Eric Koba, Marina Kolobova, Mine Kühn, Mélanie Lépori, Chia Liu, Andrea Lozer, Mădălina Manea, Lilian Marey, Muntasir Masum, Ryohei Mogi, Céline Monicolle, Saskia Morwinsky, Muhammad Muhammad, Ronald Musizvingoza, Mikko Myrskylä, Marília R. Nepomuceno, Michelle Nickel, Natalie Nitsche, Jain Nityanand, Anna Oksuzyan, Samuel Oladele, Emmanuel Olamijuwon, Oluwafunke Omodara, Soumaila Ouedraogo, Mariana Paredes, Marius Pascariu, Manuel Piriz, Raquel Pollero, Larbi Qanni, Federico Rehermann, Filipe Ribeiro, Tim Riffe, Silvia Rizzi, Francisco Rowe, Adil R. Sarhan, Isaac Sasson, Jonas Schöley, Jiaxin Shi, Erez Shomron, Rafael Silva-Ramirez, Cosmo Strozza, Catalina Torres, Sergi Trias-Llimos, Fumiya Uchikoshi, Alyson van Raalte, Paola Vazquez-Castillo, Estevão Vilela, Muhammad Ali Waqar, Iván Williams, Virginia Zarulli You can contact us at coveragedb@demogr.mpg.de

Investigating fertility response to pandemic so far was focused on the country level. However, large sub-national variation in fertility is well- documented. A regional and monthly perspective is important to fully assess fertility response to the pandemic. The study aims to: a) document sub- national monthly birth rate changes in November 2020- April 2021 (first Covid-19 wave conceptions in February 2020-July 2020), by comparing observed to expected monthly birth rates (“excess births”), b) Assess the ‘significance’ of observed changes light of expected monthly birth rates (forecasts) based on modelling prior trends, and c) explore the association between NUTS2-level regions’ “excess births” and their first wave Covid-19 affectedness.

BackgroundWhile there is a consensus that the risk of death follows a Gompertz law over much of the adult age span, no such agreement exists about the parametric form of mortality at the very beginning of life with most literature on the topic suggesting either an exponential or various power-law expressions.ObjectiveIn this paper I aim to identify the parametric shape of the infant mortality age-trajectory as observed in recent US birth cohorts across a range of social and medical strata.ResultsAge-specific infant mortality in the US displays both power-law and exponential behavior and is better described by a product of those functions: an "exponentially-truncated power-law". Across all infant populations under consideration the age-trajectory of mortality following birth is initially dominated by a power-law regime and over the course of infancy eventually approaches an exponential decline of less than a 1% reduction per additional day of age. The hazard of infant death varies in a highly non-proportional fashion by prematurity and health of the infant upon birth.ContributionThe exponentially-truncated power-law hazard is a novel tool for the study of infant mortality being more parsimonious than smoothing-splines while providing interpretable parameters and an excellent fit over a range of diverse populations. The transition from a power-law dominated neonatal mortality schedule to an exponential post-neonatal hazard has not been noted before and suggests an underlying shock-recovery or mortality selection process.

The analysis of composite data is a topic inherent to demography. In recent times, due to a growing catalogue of detailed population data, it became feasible to consider populations not only structured by time, age or sex, but by any number of interesting criteria. This “inflation” of data dimensions produces challenges in visualizing the data. To aid the understanding of age-structured timelines of compositions we seek to extend the Lexis surface plot from 1-dimensional continuous data to multidimensional composite data. We apply different strategies for visualizing composite data on the Lexis surface to French death counts given by cause and compare the results for compliance with multiple desired criteria.