The Republic of Macedonia is ranked third in terms of “excess deaths” per 100 thousand inhabitants because according to statistics 2,490 Covid-19 deaths were recorded by the end of 2020, but the number of deaths is actually 5,690 for the period from April 1 to December 31 2020, the Economist reported.

According to the analysis of the Economist, in this period 2,490 people in the country died due to Covid-19, but there were a total of 5,690 deaths, for which it cannot be said what caused them. Peru and Russia are ahead of our country, followed by Bulgaria, Lithuania, Mexico, Serbia, Ecuador and Moldova.

According to the Economist, the total number of fatalities caused by the pandemic may be even higher, for several reasons. First, the official statistics in many countries exclude victims who did not test positive for coronavirus before dying—which can be a substantial majority in places with little capacity for testing. Second, hospitals and civil registries may not process death certificates for several days, or even weeks, which creates lags in the data. And third, the pandemic has made it harder for doctors to treat other conditions and discouraged people from going to hospital, which may have indirectly caused an increase in fatalities from diseases other than covid-19.

One way to account for these methodological problems is to use a simpler measure, known as “excess deaths”: take the number of people who die from any cause in a given region and period, and then compare it with a historical baseline from recent years.