1. Occurrence, registration, and publication of deaths

Deaths are not published immediately by the official institution. The process consists of four steps, each death thus corresponding to one of four possible dates: (i) the occurrence of the death, (ii) notification to the health agencies, (iii) registration in the civil registry, and (iv) publication. For example, in France, the legal period for registering a death (step two) is 24 hours after the occurrence of the death (step one). In many countries, notifying the health agencies involves two phases, the death being reported to a regional agency, which in turn notifies a national agency. 

Publication is accelerated through the use of electronic platforms, for example at hospitals. But these systems are not always available at all the structures in the same country and do not cover deaths at socio-medical institutions or at home.

As a result, the combined total of the deaths announced daily at the socio-medical institutions of each country corresponds in part only to the combined total of deaths occurring on that day. “New death declarations” do not account for all the deaths in the last 24 hours, owing to information transmission processes, and do not solely concern the deaths having occurred in the last 24 hours. New death declarations thus include (1) the share of daily deaths that have already been recorded in the information system and (2) the deaths having occurred in the previous days that have gradually been recorded in the information system. Some countries, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, provide a daily correction of the daily totals for the preceding days, reassigning deaths reported late (see the data provided for the two countries). As such, at the start of the pandemic in Denmark, total deaths reported at 31 March 2020 and having occurred up to that date stood at 90, while the total deaths having occurred up to that date was updated to 104 on 1 April 2020 and to 110 on 7 April 2020, after which the number did not change.

There are therefore two types of time series in our database: those that publish death counts by date of occurrence and that account for retrospective corrections; and those that publish death counts by date of report or registration and that only give the most recent value of the number of deaths. The latter time series may experience unexpected decreases in the number of deaths from one week or day to another. Wherever possible, we try to document such decreases with information we can retrieve from data sources. For more information on the characteristics of time series included in the database, and their changes over time, users can browse our online interactive data explorer.