The COVID-19 pandemic caused an increase in mortality in 2020 with a resultant decrease in life expectancy in most countries around the world. In Germany, the reduction in life expectancy at birth between 2019 and 2020 was comparatively small, at -0.20 years. The decrease was stronger among men than among women (-0.24 vs. -0.13 years) and in eastern rather than in western Germany (-0.36 vs. -0.16 years). Men in eastern Germany experienced the biggest decline in life expectancy at birth (-0.41 years). For western German men, the decline was less pronounced (-0.19 years). Among women, the decline in life expectancy at birth was also greater in eastern (-0.25 years) than in western Germany (-0.10 years). As a result of these developments, the differences in life expectancy between the two parts of Germany, and between women and men, increased compared with the previous year. Life expectancy at age 65 decreased more strongly than life expectancy at birth for both sexes and in all regions. This reflects the fact that it was mainly older age groups that were affected by the increase in mortality in 2020. This paper provides further insights into mortality changes in 2020, based on age decomposition and an analysis of lifespan inequality. We conclude that the population in eastern Germany was hit harder by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 than the population in the western Germany.

BACKGROUNDInternational comparisons of mortality largely depend on the quality of data. With more than 20% of deaths annually assigned to ill-defined cardiovascular conditions, the mortality level due to well-defined causes of death is under-registered in Poland. OBJECTIVEWe aim to reclassify cardiovascular garbage codes (GCs) into well-defined causes based on multiple causes of death (MCoD) data and to approximate mortality levels due to welldefined causes of death in Poland. We examine the usefulness of the MCoD approach for correcting low-quality data on causes of death. METHODSBased on the unique MCoD dataset for Poland, death counts due to cardiovascular GCs were reassigned to well-defined underlying causes in two steps: (1) manually for death records that included MCoD information constituting a logical chain of conditions leading to death and (2) with coarsened exact matching for the remaining death records. Age-specific and age-standardised death rates for large groups of causes were calculated before and after redistribution and compared to those of other Eastern European countries with relatively good data quality. RESULTSOf deaths originally assigned to cardiovascular GCs, 86,856 were reclassified, mostly to well-defined cardiovascular diseases, cancers, endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases, and respiratory diseases. The age-standardised death rate due to well-defined ischaemic heart diseases increased by 43%, and the rate due to cerebrovascular diseases by 22%. Cardiovascular mortality structure by large groups of causes became similar to

No abstract