Ferenci Tamás (Óbudai Egyetem): Comparing methods to predict baseline mortality for excess mortality calculations

The World Health Organization (WHO)’s excess mortality estimates presented in May 2022 stirred controversy, due in part to the high estimate provided for Germany, which was later attributed to the spline model used. In my talk I'll give a brief overview of the problem that was the underlying cause for WHO's erroneous estimate, I introduce a framework that allows the rigorous investigation of such problems using simulation with realistic synthetic datasets, and present the first results. These also give guidance on how to predict mortality for excess mortality calculations.