Visualizing mortality trends across time and age groups
This post contains an analysis of the daily mortality in France over the last 4 years. The data is analyzed globally and by age group, and whenever possible a link is made with the pandemic containment measures active at the time.
The raw data analyzed here can be downloaded freely from the French National Institute of Statistics and Economics Studies (INSEE). To directly download of the data I have in the analysis please click here. The data spans from 1st of January 2018 until 6th of December 2021. The notebook I used to generate the various plots presented here is publicly available on GitHub.
1. Overview
The comparison between the number of daily deaths in France for the studied period can be seen on the plot bellow. The peak corresponding to the first covid19 wave in spring 2020 is easily visible on the graph, as well as the second wave starting from November 2020.
Overall mortality in 2021 is still high but does not reach the same peaks as in 2020, thanks to the deployment of the vaccination (starting from December 27th 2020) and to the overall improvement in the treatment protocol.

A few important dates can help make sense of some of the tendencies visible on this plot :
- 17th of March 2020 – the French government imposes a 1st general strict confinement of the population. It will last until the 10th of May 2020.
- 20th July 2020 – masks become mandatory in closed environments.
- 30th of October 2020 – 2nd confinement (slightly less strict than the first one). It will last until 15th of December 2020, with some of the restrictions lifted only beginning of February 2021.
- February 2021— Vaccines are available for people over 50.
- 3rd of April 2021 – 3rd general confinement starts lasting until 3rd of May 2021 (during this period schools and nurseries remain closed).
- July 2021— Delta variant represents the majority of new cases.
- 21 July 2021 – the health pass is introduced in France, its range of application is gradually expanded throughout August 2021.
- 13th September 2021 – A 3rd shot becomes available for those that have had their last shot more than 6 months ago.
2. Global analysis by age group
The data has been split into the same age groups as in the different analysis published by the INSEE. This allows us to compare the total number of deaths by age groups between the different years.

Please bear in mind that data from the last three weeks of 2021 is missing and that over these last 3 weeks the average number of daily deaths was increasing as it can be seen here. However I was unable to integrate this information as no details about the age groups were provided.
To go further into details, we can analyze the distribution of the daily mortality by year and by age group. From the box-plots bellow it can be seen that, for the age groups 0–24, 25–49 and 50–64, the average daily death count in France has been steady over the last 4 years (slightly decreasing for the 0–24 group). For the 50–64 group however some high outliers are visible, even though the average seems similar to the other years.

The age group 65–74 seems heavily affected by the pandemic, with visibly higher rates of mortality through 2020 and an average that maintained high in 2021. The study of the complete time series will provide more insight, but the higher rates can probably be explained by the vulnerability of this age group with respect to covid19 infections and their delayed access to vaccination (vaccination in France has been deployed in waves, priority given to older age groups).

For the groups 75–84 and 85+ the impact of the two covid19 waves in 2020 is clearly visible (especially in the outliers to the right of the distribution). Average still stayed high for these groups in 2021, but with a reduced number in the tail of the distribution (red curve 2021, green curve 2020).
3. Daily mortality plots by age groups
The time series plots complete the observations highlighted in the previous section and help make sense of some of the extreme values for the daily mortality seen in the box-plots.
For the age groups 0–24 and 25–49 the mortality rates are very similar over the last 4 years and don’t seem to be impacted by the covid19 pandemic.


The extra mortality due to covid19 starts to be visible in the age group 50–65 years, especially during the first wave in 2020. In 2021 the extra mortality visible in May seems to reach similar levels as the seasonal flu epidemic in 2018 but over a slightly longer period of time

As seen in the previous section, the age group 65–74 has not been affected by large spikes in the daily mortality but the higher values on average last over a large period of time both in 2020 and 2021. The improvement seen in autumn 2021 with respect to 2020 can probably be attributed to the overall high vaccination coverage in this age group.

For the age groups 75–85 and +85 the impact of the first 2 waves in 2020 is easily visible. After the start of the vaccination the extra mortality stabilizes to levels that are comparable to those reached during the seasonal flu epidemics in 2019 and 2018, but the particularity is that the extra mortality spans over a much larger period of time.
The protection provided by the vaccination for these age groups is clearly visible in the normal daily death rates reached in the fall 2021.


Conclusion
I performed this analysis for myself to make sense of the current times. France is currently affected by the spread of the Omicron variant so the observations presented here might not remain valid for a long time.