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.
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