THE number of Filipinos who died in 2021 was the highest in 63 years, according to the Commission on Population and Development (Popcom).
Popcom said the crude death rate (CDR) is the ratio of the number of deaths occurring within one year to the mid-year population expressed per 1,000 population, as defined by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).
Based on Popcom estimates, the country’s crude death rate is 8.02 per thousand Filipinos. This was the highest since 1958 when the crude death rate was at 8.4 per thousand people.
“It took 20 years for the CDR to rise by 1 per thousand from 2000 when it was 4.8, to 2019 when it climbed to 5.8,” noted Undersecretary for Population and Development Juan Antonio Perez III. “The last time the country had a CDR that high was in 1958, when it was at 8.4.”
Popcom, citing PSA data, said the month which topped the number of deaths was September 2021, when 119,758 Filipinos perished. Almost 4,000 Filipinos died every day that month (3,992), and almost three every minute (2.7).
A major contributor to 2021’s excess mortalities was attributed to Covid-19. The pandemic caused the death of 105,723 Filipinos which was 71 percent higher than the 30,188 overall “Covid” deaths in 2020.
“(Excess mortalities is) the difference between expected numbers of deaths based on a mortality schedule in a given period and the actual deaths in the same period as defined by the United States’ Center for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC,” Popcom said.
As of May 21, 2022, registered deaths due to Covid-19 accounted for a total of 10,226 deaths, or 6.5 percent of the total registered deaths from January to April 2022, according to the PSA.
For almost 2.5 years since January 2020, Popcom said, there have been 146,137 Covid-associated mortalities.
“Excess mortality triggered by Covid in 2021 was the major reason, but the collateral impact of a major epidemic weakened the health response to the leading causes of disease which altogether caused more mortalities than the triggering event of Covid,” Perez told BusinessMirror.
Other causes
Popcom said there were 159,770 excess mortalities unrelated to Covid-19, but were rather caused by other diseases that claimed more lives along with the deadly viral infection in 2021.
“The lockdowns affected access of those needing health care to primary levels of care and higher levels of health care. Those who died from the other leading causes of disease were probably affected earlier in the pandemic (as early as 2020) and the accumulated lack of care became more manifest in 2021 when the hospital system became overwhelmed, leading to increased mortalities as non-Covid emergencies could get only limited access to scarce tertiary health care,” Perez explained to this newspaper.
These were attributed to ischemic heart disease which increased by 29.7 percent; cerebrovascular disease, 15.3 percent; diabetes mellitus, 21 percent; and hypertensive disease or hypertension, 31.5 percent were among the top causes of deaths in the country.
Deaths due to malnutrition also increased by 47 percent. BusinessMirror reported that starvation has killed 355 Filipinos between 2006 and 2020. At least 90.14 percent of these deaths, or a total of 320, happened just in a span of four years: between 2017 and 2020. (Full story here: https://businessmirror.com.ph/2022/07/28/one-nation-undernutrition-when-inequality-brings-death-malnutrition-to-phls-doorsteps/)
Meanwhile, Popcom said deaths caused by neoplasms, or various forms of cancers, declined 10.3 percent.
“Many of the diseases that caused increased mortality are preventable at the primary level of care, but the health system was not flexible enough to treat and care for both Covid and non-Covid patients,” Perez said. “The decrease in cancer-related deaths was most likely due to the lack of tertiary level of diagnostic and therapeutic care, as ‘COVID’ cases crowded out actual and undiagnosed cancer patients.”
The Popcom chief believes that from top to bottom, the Philippine health system was severely challenged in 2021, thus: “Its recovery requires more resources in the immediate future.”