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Excess Mortality in Suicide caused by COVID-19 in Japan: Update up to the end of 2021

##article.authors##

  • Junko Kurita Department of Nursing, Faculty of Sport and Health Science, Daito Bunka University
  • Tamie Sugawara Infectious Disease Surveillance Center, National Institute of Infectious Diseases
  • Yasushi Ohkusa Infectious Disease Surveillance Center, National Institute of Infectious Diseases

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51094/jxiv.122

Keywords:

COVID-19, excess mortality, NIID model, stochastic frontier estimation, suicide

Abstract

Background: Countermeasures against COVID-19 outbreak such as lockdown and voluntary restrictions against going out adversely affect human stress and economic activity. Particularly, this stress might lead to suicide.

Object: We examined excess mortality attributable to suicide caused by COVID-19.

Method: We applied the NIID model to suicide deaths from October 2009 through January, 2022 for the whole of Japan by gender. Effects of the great earthquake that struck in eastern Japan on March 11, 2011 were incorporated into the estimation model.

Results: Significant excess mortality in suicide was found between July, 2020 and July, 2021 for both genders. However, in August and September, 2021, excess mortality in suicide was detected only in female. It was greater among females than among males. In total, 2950 excess cases of mortality were identified.

Discussion and Conclusion: Excess mortality during the four months was more than two times greater than the number of COVID-19 deaths confirmed by PCR testing. Countermeasures against COVID-19 should be chosen carefully in light of suicide effects.

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References

Kurita J, Sugawara T, Ohkusa Y. Huge Excess Mortality Due to the Delta Strain of COVID-19 in Japan in August 2021. JDR 2022;17:57-60.

Japan times. Pandemic raises Japan suicide rate after decade of decline. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/01/22/national/japan-suicide-rate/ [accessed on July 3, 2022]

Watanabea M, Tanaka H. Increased suicide mortality in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Psychiatry Res 2022; 309: 114422.

Kurita J, Sugawara T, Ohkusa Y. Excess Mortality in Suicide caused by COVID-19 in Japan. Journal of Disaster Research 2022.17;51-6.

Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. Preliminary statistics on demographicshttps://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/list/81-1a.html (in Japanese) [accessed on July 17, 2022]

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Submitted: 2022-07-22 04:56:56 UTC

Published: 2022-07-25 09:46:25 UTC

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Section
General Medicine, Social Medicine, & Nursing Sciences

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Copyright (c) 2022 Junko Kurita
Tamie Sugawara
Yasushi Ohkusa

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.