The covid-19 killed almost 70,000 French people in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, which made it the third cause of death behind cancer and cardiovascular diseases, shows a study published this Tuesday by the health authorities.
“With around 69,000 deaths, Covid-19 is the third cause of death in France in 2020, behind tumors and diseases of the circulatory system”, summarizes this work, carried out by the French Public Health Agency, the health and social statistics department. ministries (DREES) and Inserm.
A tenth of the French who died in 2020 died of Covid (10.4%), with more than a quarter (25.6%) succumbing to tumors and around a fifth (20.2%) to heart disease -neurovascular.
Half of the deaths among people older than 85 years
Like in most other countries, Covid arrived in France at the beginning of 2020 and turned out to be particularly deadly in certain categories of people, first of all the elderly.
Slightly more than half of the victims of a SARS-Cov-2 infection in 2020 were 85 years or older, men who died from Covid were on average younger than women.
The figures in the study, drawn from death certificates issued that year, reflect a situation in which mortality had not yet been greatly reduced with the advent of vaccines.
Decrease in other deaths due to confinements
They also attest to a decrease in deaths linked to a cause other than Covid (respiratory and infectious diseases, traffic accidents). Some sick or frail people, who would have died that year from the main deadly pathologies, could have died from Covid instead, due to a possible “competitive” effect, according to the study authors.
The various measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus may also have had an effect on the drop in non-Covid related deaths. These measures included, in particular, various lockdowns, one of which, particularly drastic, lasted from March to May 2020.
There was probably “a protective effect, particularly against respiratory and infectious diseases and transport accidents, linked to the preventive measures that accompanied the health crisis,” the authors advance.
“However, other mortality impacts of this outbreak and its longer-term context cannot be excluded, requiring ongoing periodic surveillance across all causes of death,” the authors conclude.
Source: BFM TV
