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# Excess mortality in South Korea peaked in 2022 and stayed raised through 2024
- URL: https://www.coios.me/excess-mortality-in-south-korea-peaked-in-2022-and-stayed/
- Published: 2026-11-03T12:50:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-03T17:58:00.000Z
- Description: South Korea had 194,173 excess deaths (+12.8%) in 2020-2024, peaking in 2022 and still 18.3% above expected in 2024.
- Author: Daniel Ryan
- Tags: Behavioural science, Infection and pandemics, South Korea, #peer-reviewed, #refines, #item, #source-2026-11, #score-50

The study estimated all-cause and cause-specific excess mortality in South Korea for 2020-2024, using Statistics Korea data. Monthly deaths were grouped by ICD-10 chapter, with expected deaths from an exponential smoothing model trained on 2000-2019\. There were 194,173 excess deaths (+12.8%), rising from 1.0% in 2020 to 23.3% in 2022\. Excess peaked at +66.8% in March 2022 and stayed at 16.4% in 2023 and 18.3% in 2024\. Infectious disease deaths peaked at +1,424.7% in March 2022 and showed significant excess throughout 2024\. The estimates rest on a single forecasting model projecting pre-2020 trends.

*Why it is interesting: Excess deaths persisted after the 2022 peak and beyond COVID-19's reclassification in August 2023\. Respiratory excess began in 2022 and neoplasm excess in 2023-2024, unlike the brief cardiovascular excess in March 2022.*

Source

[Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, 2 November 2026](https://doi.org/10.3961/jpmph.26.208?ref=coios.me)

Paper

Estimating All-cause and Cause-specific Excess Mortality During the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Korea

Authors

Bui LTM, Cho J, Hong YC, Choi YJ

DOI

10.3961/jpmph.26.208

Type

Peer-reviewed article

Design

National time-series excess mortality estimation, monthly all-cause and four ICD-10 cause groups, Statistics Korea 2000-2024, ETS baseline trained on 2000-2019, 194,173 excess deaths over 2020-2024

Verdict

Refines prior evidence

Driver

[Infection and pandemics](https://www.coios.me/d-infectious-disease/)