Enrique Acosta

Centre D'Estudis Demogràfics

This work contributes to the current understanding of the heterogeneous impact of the Covid‐19 pandemic on fertility. Using more than 36.4 million birth and death records for Brazil and Colombia (2015–2021), we document state‐level correlations between the intensity of the pandemic, measured by the current and 9‐month lagged excess mortality, and t...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic's impact on mortality, especially among the elderly, has been extensively studied. While COVID-19 rarely causes direct mortality in children and youth, the pandemic's indirect effects might harm these age groups. Yet, its influence on stillbirths and mortality rates in neonates, infants, children, and youth remains...

Background: US racial-ethnic mortality disparities are well documented and central to debates on social inequalities in health. Standard measures, such as life expectancy or years of life lost, are based on synthetic populations and do not account for the real underlying populations experiencing the inequalities. Methods: We analyze US mortality...

Estimating the number of deaths attributable to COVID-19 around the world is a complex task — as highlighted by one attempt to measure global excess mortality in 2020 and 2021. COVID-related mortality rates by country for 2020 and 2021.

The Covid-19 pandemic has not affected the population evenly. This must be acknowledged when it comes to understanding the Covid-19 death toll and answering the question of how many life years have been lost. We use level of geriatric care to account for variation in remaining life expectancy among individuals that died during 2020. Based on a link...

Objectives Reductions in US cardiovascular (CVD) mortality have stagnated. While other high life expectancy countries (HLC) have also recently experienced a stall, the stagnation in CVD mortality in the US appeared earlier and has been more pronounced. The reasons for the stall are unknown. We analyze cross-national variations in mortality trends t...

Background: Germany experienced one of the lowest COVID-19 case-fatality rates (CFRs) in Western Europe in the first pandemic wave, and further CFR decreases in the spring and summer of 2020. However, Germany’s CFR increased markedly during the second wave, becoming one of the highest in Western Europe. Furthermore, CFRs varied considerably across...

How deadly is an infection with SARS-CoV-2 worldwide over time? This information is critical for developing and assessing public health responses on the country and global levels. However, imperfect data have been the most limiting factor for estimating the COVID-19 infection fatality burden during the first year of the pandemic. Here we leverage r...

Information about pandemic dynamics is crucial to understand the potential impacts on populations, design mitigation strategies and evaluate the efficacy of their implementation. Centralization, standardization and harmonization of data are critical to enable comparisons of the demographic impact of COVID-19 which take into account differences in t...

Background All-cause excess mortality is a comprehensive measure of the combined direct and indirect effects of COVID-19 on mortality. Estimates are usually derived from Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) systems, but these do not include non-registered deaths, which may be affected by changes in vital registration coverage over time....

COVerAGE-DB is an open-access database including cumulative counts of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths and tests by age and sex. Original data and sources are provided alongside data and measures in age-harmonized formats. The database is in continuous development. It includes data since January 2020, and as of 7 January 2021, it includes 108 count...

Methods and data sources for the manuscript “Optimal vaccination age varies across countries”, which elaborates on the findings by Goldstein, Cassidy, and Wachter (2021).

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Covid‐19 had caused more than 1,4 million deaths worldwide by November 26th, 2020. Age is a strong predictor of Covid‐19 mortality. Crude death rates have been used to compare the response of countries, however, this measure does not account for age structure. We report age‐adjusted mortality and rates at similar timeframes, ~100 days from the 50th...

Understanding the mortality impact of COVID-19 requires not only counting the dead, but analyzing how premature the deaths are. We calculate years of life lost (YLL) across 81 countries due to COVID-19 attributable deaths, and also conduct an analysis based on estimated excess deaths. We find that over 20.5 million years of life have been lost to C...

COVerAGE-DB is an open-access database including cumulative counts of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths, and tests by age and sex. Original data and sources are provided alongside data and measures in age-harmonized formats. The database is still in development, and at this writing, it includes 87 countries, and 195 subnational areas. Cumulative cou...

The population-level case-fatality rate (CFR) associated with COVID-19 varies substantially, both across countries at any given time and within countries over time. We analyze the contribution of two key determinants of the variation in the observed CFR: the age-structure of diagnosed infection cases and age-specific case-fatality rates. We use dat...

Understanding the mortality impact of COVID-19 requires not only counting the dead, but analyzing how premature the deaths are. We calculate years of life lost (YLL) across 42 countries due to COVID-19 attributable deaths, and also conduct an analysis based on estimated excess deaths. As of June 13th 2020, YLL in heavily affected countries are 2 to...

Age is fundamental to understanding differences in mortality risks. Indeed, age is a marker of the gradual accumulation of permanent damage over the life course and, consequently, is highly associated with chronic diseases and disabilities. Since there is evidence that individuals with preexisting chronic conditions are at an increased risk of seve...

Understanding the mortality impact of COVID-19 requires not only counting the dead, but analyzing how premature the deaths are. We calculate years of life lost (YLL) across 42 countries due to COVID-19 attributable deaths, and also conduct an analysis based on estimated excess deaths. As of June 13th 2020, YLL in heavily affected countries are 2 to...

The population-level case fatality rate (CFR) associated with COVID-19 varies substantially, both across countries and within countries over time. We analyze the contribution of two key determinants of the variation in the observed CFR: the age-structure of diagnosed infection cases and age-specific case-fatality rates. We use data on diagnosed COV...

The population-level case fatality rate (CFR) associated with COVID-19 varies substantially, both across countries and within countries over time. We analyze the contribution of two key determinants of the variation in the observed CFR: the age-structure of diagnosed infection cases and age-specific case-fatality rates. We use data on diagnosed COV...

When H3N2 replaced H1N1 as the dominant influenza subtype during the 2018-19 season, the pattern of age-specific influenza incidence shifted due to the lingering effects of antigenic imprinting. The characteristic shape that imprinting leaves on influenza susceptibility could foster important advances in understanding and predicting the epidemiolog...

After decades of improvement, life expectancy momentarily declined during 2014-15 in several high-income countries, with subsequent reversals in some cases. The main sources of this stagnation have been increases in mortality from influenza and drug overdoses, mainly for the baby-boomer generation. This trend is unexpected because it has long been...

The analysis of age-period-cohort (APC) patterns of vital rate changes over time is of great importance for understanding demographic phenomena. Given the limitations of statistical modeling, the use of graphical analyses is often regarded as a more transparent approach to identifying APC effects. The current paper proposes a Lexis plot for the dep...

Electronic material for reproducing the results of Acosta and van Raalte (2019) Age-Period-Cohort Patterns on Lexis Plots. Demographic Research. 41(42) 1205–1234. http://dx.doi.org/10.4054/DemRes.2019.41.42

The authors would like to correct the second sentence of the abstract to read: "First, we use Lexis surfaces based on Serfling models to highlight influenza mortality patterns as well as to identify lingering effects of early-life exposure to specific influenza virus subtypes (e.g., H1N1, H3N2)."

Electronic material for replicating the results of Acosta et al. (2019) Determinants of Influenza Mortality Trends: Age-Period-Cohort Analysis of Influenza Mortality in the United States, 1959–2016. Demography. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13524-019-00809-y

This study examines the roles of age, period, and cohort in influenza mortality trends over the years 1959–2016 in the United States. First, we use Lexis surfaces based on Serfling models to highlight influenza mortality patterns as well as to identify lingering effects of early-life exposure to specific influenza virus subtypes (e.g., H1N1, H3N2)....

Baby boomers’ mortality has been deteriorated or stagnated, compared to the secular trend. Recent studies claimed that the excess mortality of boomers has been due to suicides, accidental overdoses and other external causes. We found most of the boomer’s mortality disadvantage, regardless of race/ethnicity, is related to causes of death linked to...

The identification of age-period-cohort (APC) patterns on vital rate changes over time is of great importance for the understanding of demographic phenomena. In one single visualization, we combine the dynamics of the location, magnitude, and spread of temporal effects for multiple populations or demographic phenomena. The APC curvature plot offers...

Recent outbreaks of H5, H7, and H9 influenza A viruses in humans have served as a vivid reminder of the potentially devastating effects that a novel pandemic could exert on the modern world. Those who have survived infections with influenza viruses in the past have been protected from subsequent antigenically similar pandemics through adaptive immu...

Suicide mortality is an important and overlooked consequence of political and criminal violence in Colombia between 1980 and 2015. The results show that the highest increases of suicide for both sexes occurred during the period dominated by political violence (1995-2009). Furthermore, armed conflict seems to have strong short-term effects on mal...

What makes the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic stand out from all the others is its well-known W-shaped mortality signature, which was caused by unusually high mortality among adults aged 20 to 40 [1]. Much debate remains as to the exact reason for this atypical pattern [2]. A contribution by Worobey et al. [3] published recently in the Proceedings...