Analysis of the Excess Deaths in Ecuador caused by the COVID-19 during 2020 and 2021
Received: 13 August 2024 | Revised: 30 October 2024 and 8 November 2024 | Accepted: 2 December 2024 | Online: 13 December 2024
Corresponding author: Lorena Isabel Barona Lopez
Abstract
Ecuador became one of the most affected countries in the world from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020: the number of deaths during March and April of 2020 suggests that the pandemic in this country was much worse than the studies reported by the Ecuadorian national institutions. A number of studies concerning the number of excess deaths have been conducted, but they used a limited amount of data because of the time they were done. Additionally, these studies do not provide a way of comparing results with those of other countries since they use the raw number of excess deaths, and not a relative measure. This study fills all these gaps by presenting an analysis of the excess deaths (raw and per 100000 inhabitants). For this analysis, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) were used to do a forecasting. These methods were trained using the data of deaths in Ecuador before the pandemic, over a period of 5 years. The methodology used for this work takes steps from recognized guidelines from CDC and the University of Melbourne to compute the excess deaths. In 2020, Ecuador had an excess death of 42009 ± 5823 people, which means an excess death within 207.14 to 273.81 people per 100,000 inhabitants. The decrease of deaths due to land traffic accidents, congenital malformations, deformities, chromosomal abnormalities and HIV in 2020 was 435. Additionally, the causes with the highest excess deaths were respiratory insufficiency, influenza and pneumonia, ischemic heart diseases, hypertensive diseases and mellitus diabetes. In order to contrast these numbers, a computation of the excess (decrease) of deaths was computed.
Keywords:
excess death rate, artificial neural networks, ARIMA, Ecuador, SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19Downloads
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Copyright (c) 2024 Marco E. Benalcazar, Cesar Israel Leon Cifuentes, Jose Miguel Munoz Ona, Angel Leonardo Valdivieso Caraguay, Lorena Isabel Barona Lopez
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