Assessment Of COVID-19 Pandemic-Related Detrimental Impact On The Population Of Nuclear City: Two-Year Results

Background — Since the announcement of the global coronavirus infection disease (COVID-19) pandemic, the attempts to assess the pandemic-related detrimental impact are of particular interest. The methodology of assessing the overall mortality attributed to COVID-19 pandemic, unlike the use of specific indicators that are sensitive to different methods of accounting the number of infected and deaths, provides more clear understanding of the pandemic-related impact. Objective — Quantitative assessment of the pandemic-related detrimental impact caused by the novel coronavirus infection in a small nuclear city, which is relevant for evaluating the effectiveness of anti-epidemic measures. Methods and Results — The population changes in a small urban district located in the South Ural Region of the Russian Federation were retrospectively analyzed for the decade, based on the open-source demographic data. The pandemic-related detrimental impact was calculated as overall excess mortality rate, compared with the previous non-pandemic years by using the additive model of excess absolute risk. The number of absolute excess deaths, adjusted for gender, age, population size, and number of diseased, was modeled using multivariate linear regression. The pandemic-related detriment was calculated based on the number of predicted excess deaths attributed to COVID-19. The relationship between the total number of deaths and the number of COVID-19 cases was analyzed. The total predicted two-year excess of pandemic-related deaths was 557.9. The pandemic-related total excess mortality per 1,000 patients infected with SARS-Cov-2 was 50.2 (95% CI 38.4; 62.0). Conclusion — The analyses revealed significant impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the overall excess mortality in the nuclear city population in 2020 and 2021 implemented in both direct and indirect way. The population size was a major significant risk factor confounding the overall mortality. In order to develop an effective strategy to control and prevent the consequences of a pandemic, further monitoring of the epidemic situation in a nuclear city is required.