The number of deaths from COVID-19 during the pandemic is higher than on weekends

Experts from the University of Toronto in Canada analyzed all the cases death due to COVID-19 reported to the database COVID-19 of the World Health Organization for the period from March 7, 2020 to March 7, 2022.

The average number of deaths globally from COVID-19 over the weekend was 6% higher than on weekdays (8,532 versus 8,083 cases) throughout the pandemic, the researchers said.

The results of the study will be presented at this year’s Congress of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Portugal at the end of April. The study found that the UK had an average of 239 deaths from COVID-19 over the weekend compared with 215 patients on weekdays, an increase of 11%.

The US had an average of 1,483 deaths on weekends compared with 1,220 on weekdays, a 22% increase. And Brazil had an average of 1,061 deaths on weekends compared with 823 on weekdays, a 29% increase.

Further analysis of the average number of COVID-19 deaths on individual days of the week shows that the increase is particularly large when comparing Sunday with Monday (8,850 versus 7,219 deaths) and Friday through Monday (9,086 vs 7,219).

According to the study, the UK has an average of 239 deaths on weekends compared to 215 on weekdays. (Photo: Sky News)

One of the researchers, Dr. Fizza Manzoor, said the delay in reporting deaths over the weekend did not fully explain the difference in different countries. For example, Germany reported fewer deaths on average on weekends (137 patients) than on weekdays (187).

Dr Manzoor said: “The bureaucratic delay on weekends alone does not explain why fewer COVID-19 deaths were recorded on Monday than on Friday, nor the The increase in the death toll over the weekend is significant in the US, but it’s not in Germany.

Instead, this “weekend effect” is also likely due to a lack of medical staff, capacity and experience. Furthermore, our findings suggest that this problem is not being addressed despite improved health system performance and awareness during the pandemic.

Therefore, health systems need to be further improved in providing clinical care every day of the week.”

The researchers also agreed that the study’s conclusions could be limited by false negatives, missed cases, and data entry errors, and that available data do not take into account severity disease severity or the impact of local public health policies and interventions in each country.

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