Chronicle
Significantly more people died in Vorarlberg last year than in the years before the pandemic. According to preliminary information from Statistics Austria, 3,535 people died last year – that is 16.5 percent more than the average of recent years. In no other federal state was the increase as high as in Vorarlberg.
According to preliminary figures, 91,765 people died in Austria in 2022. “That is 10.7 percent more than the average of the last five years before the outbreak of the pandemic and also more than would have been expected due to the aging of the population,” reported Statistics Austria Director General Tobias Thomas on Thursday. Life expectancy for women is 83.7 years and for men 79 years below the level from 2016 to 2019. However, the long-term trend is increasing.
Vorarlberg with the strongest increase
The statistics for the previous year will be a little higher, since no deaths of Austrians abroad are included and late registrations by the registry offices are to be expected, was explained in the broadcast. In any case, the preliminary number of deaths was similar to that in 2021, when 91,962 deaths were registered.
In Vienna, the difference to the five-year average from 2015 to 2019 was the smallest at plus 6.1 percent deaths, while Vorarlberg recorded the greatest deviation at plus 16.5 percent.
Strong increase at the end of the year
There were a particularly large number of deaths in the last few weeks of 2022 and also in the first few weeks of 2023. Compared to the five-year average of the same calendar weeks (week 52 to week 2) of the years before the start of the corona pandemic, deaths occurred in the 52nd calendar week of 2022 by 32 percent, in the 1st calendar week 2023 by 29.8 percent and in the 2nd calendar week 2023 by 12.6 percent more people.
The sharp increase in deaths coincided with the current wave of influenza, and thousands of new corona infections were still being registered every day, Statistics Austria recently explained on the death statistics for December 2022.