POPCOM: Philippines’ 879K deaths in 2021 is highest in a year

The Philippines has recorded 879,429 fatalities in 2021, the highest number of deaths in a single year, the Commission on Population and Development (POPCOM) said on Wednesday.

The POPCOM, citing the data from Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) released on August 13, said this was higher by 265,493 than in 2020 when the PSA recorded 613,936 deaths.

The commission said the highest number of deaths in a 12-month period was in 2019 with  620,414 mortalities, and more than 1,700 daily.

It, however, said there were about 2,700 deaths reported every day in 2021.

The POPCOM said “in normal years” the rise in the number of deaths is only at around 1% to 5%.

In 2021, the crude death rate (CDR), which defined by the PSA as the ratio of the number of deaths occurring within one year to the mid-year population expressed per 1,000 population, was estimated by POPCOM at 8.02 per 1,000 Filipinos.

This was a sharp rise from the rate of 5.6 per 1,000 in 2020.

“It took 20 years for the CDR to go up by one per 1,000 from 2000 when it was 4.8, to 2019 when it climbed to 5.8,” POPCOM executive director Juan Antonio Perez III said in a statement.

“The last time the country had a CDR that high was in 1958, when it was at 8.4 per 1,000 population,” he added.

The POPCOM said at least 119,758 fatalities were reported in September 2021, while 4,000 Filipinos died every day in the said month, and almost three every minute.

COVID-19 deaths

According to POPCOM, the major contributor to the excess mortality in 2021 was attributed to COVID-19 pandemic as related deaths reported were 105,723. It was 71% higher than the 30,188 overall COVID-19 deaths in 2020.

As of May 21, 2022, the registered deaths due to COVID-19 accounted for a total of 10,226 deaths or 6.5 percent of the total registered deaths from January to April 2022, according to the PSA data.

It also showed that there have been 146,137 COVID-19 associated mortalities since January 2020.

The POPCOM said there were 159,770 excess mortalities unrelated to COVID-19, but were rather caused by other diseases that claimed more lives along with the deadly viral infection in 2021.

Among the top causes of deaths in the country were ischemic heart disease or heart attacks with 29.7%; cerebrovascular disease or strokes with 15.3%; diabetes mellitus with 21%; and hypertensive disease or hypertension with 31.5%.

Furthermore, deaths due to malnutrition climbed to 47%, while those triggered by neoplasms, or various forms of cancers, were down 10.3%.

"Many of the diseases that caused increased mortality are preventable at the primary level of care, but the health system was not flexible enough to treat and care for both COVID and non-COVID patients,” Perez said.

“On the other hand, the decrease in cancer-related deaths was most likely due to the lack of tertiary level of diagnostic and therapeutic care, as ‘COVID’ cases crowded out actual and undiagnosed cancer patients,” he added.

Perez said that the Philippine healthcare system was severely challenged in 2021, adding that “Its recovery requires more resources in the immediate future.” —NB, GMA News