All‐cause mortality and Japan's early countermeasures

A paper by Onozuk et al. quantified this deficit as 20,982 fewer deaths than expected (95% empirical confidence interval: −38,367 to −5472). 3 Accordingly, life expectancy increased, while in many other countries it decreased. 4 This is particularly striking given that the government did not impose a lockdown. 5 In contrast, Italy, which imposed various mitigation measures, including lockdowns, experienced 100,526 excess deaths in 2020 (95% CI: 97,575–103,560) according to a study by Dorrucci et al. 6 Several studies have found that the majority of countries experienced significant excess mortality in 2020. AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS Søren Roest Korsgaard: Conceptualization; investigation; writing—original draft; funding acquisition; methodology; validation; visualization; writing—review and editing; formal analysis; software; project administration; resources; supervision; data curation.