Has anyone made an attempt to quantify the effect of the pandemic on population? Either for the world as a whole or for a significant part of it? Or even just a major country?
It’s not just the raw death counts. Those don’t tell anywhere near the entire story. There’s lots of things with this pandemic besides people dying of COVID that will affect population growth. And for some countries (especially India and Russia), I don’t believe the numbers anyway.
The Worldometers site, besides having the pages with the pandemic numbers that Snowboarder_Bo posts, also has a whole set of pages about the populations of all countries. They have both history of populations and projections of future change. But as far as I can tell, those haven’t been modified at all. They certainly don’t mention the pandemic anywhere on those pages. They have a “Contact Us” feature and I sent them an email request about this, but never got a reply. I suspect I’m not the only one.
Yeah, not quite sure what you’re getting at. Currently Peru leads the deaths per capita at 5897 deaths per million, or 0.6% of their population in round numbers, then Hungary next at 3,000.
Even if Peru massively under-reported, and the minus-side mortality [fewer people on the roads so fewer car accidents, influenza deaths minimised etc] was negligible, that would put it at no more than ~1% of the population overall. Peru’s birthrate well exceeds that [18,000 births per million] so demographically it is negligible. If you tried to balance it over a year, you’d replenish the numbers you lost by the end of April.
Only in very low birthrate / high covid countries might there be concerns but otherwise its probably within natural replenishment capacity. Italy for example has low birthrate [7,000 per million, but 2,129 covid deaths per million] still works out at ~3:1.
Other effects like reduced fertility for those who contracted covid seem to be there, but emerge in statistical analysis rather than being apparent, and some evidence of higher pre-term delivery, which might mean higher mortality depending probably on the usual inequalities . Economic problems caused by covid in some countries might dampen family desire to have kids for a few years.
Taken together the loss in most places is likely within their capacity to accommodate with normal birth rates, and while there might be a distinct measurable effect in life tables, especially when factoring in the higher number of elderly deaths, its a statistically modest impact [just a vast and almost completely avoidable political failure].
Not that that’s an accurate raw death count, but I did say
You have to look at the total number of deaths and compare them to the average of the last 5 or 10 years. As I understand it, in most countries that total number of deaths is way up. Much more than the raw numbers of people dying of COVID. And likely the number of births is down, although I could be wrong about that.
Anyway, I’m wondering if any demographers or demographic agencies have issued revised estimates of future populations.
How could they possibly do this with any level of accuracy? We have no way of knowing if 10 people will die of COVID in 2022 or 100 million. We don’t know what variants will be spreading in a few months. We have known COVID deaths and we have excess deaths (which don’t always align, as there is much underreporting) but we don’t and can’t have future COVID deaths. You can easily enough find projections, but there are so many assumptions built into them that they are of little use.
Nor do we know if magical fairy dust will bring back the dead. We do happen to be aware that there is an unpredictable pandemic going on, which is having effects that have proven difficult to model.