January saw highest Covid death toll since last May; Nearly 25K in NL have died

Some 4,387 people are known to have died from a cause which was linked to Covid-19 in January this year. That is the highest monthly total recorded since May 2020, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) reported on Tuesday.

The provisional figures show that 24,484 in total have died from Covid-19 from March 2020 through January 2021. That figure in nearly ten thousand higher than data provided by public health agency RIVM, which said on February 1 that it knew of 14,025 deaths caused by the disease. All cause of death reports in the country are filed with the official statistics bureau, but there is no requirement for the data to be shared between healthcare organizations and public health agency RIVM. Data is not sent to the CBS until all lab work is completed, which might also account for the discrepancy.

January 2021 reflected the second-highest monthly total of Covid-19 deaths in the Netherlands. In April 2020, the CBS said that 4,867 people definitively died from the disease, and 1,505 others likely died from the same cause, or 6,372 in total. During the months of March, April and May last year, coronavirus testing was hard to come by, making a definitive diagnosis more difficult.

Most of the Covid-19 deaths during the first month of 2021 occurred during the first week of January, after which the number started to steadily decline. Doctors could conclude that 18 percent of all deaths in the Netherlands that month were caused by Covid-19. A considerable number of nursing home residents and other long-term care recipients died from the disease during the first month of this year. Within these groups, one in three deaths that occurred was presumably caused by Covid-19.

These groups were also among the first to receive the coronavirus jab after the vaccination campaign kicked off on January 6.