Mortality in Switzerland in 2021.

To analyze mortality trends in Switzerland in 2021, the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, we compared mortality in Switzerland in 2021 with that of previous years in terms of standardized weekly deaths, standardized (annual) mortality rates (overall and stratified by age and sex) and life expectancy. The latter is a well-known demographic concept defining the average lifespan of a hypothetical cohort living and dying according to the mortality rates of a given year. After a favorable first half of the year and a fairly standard second half in terms of mortality in Switzerland, the year 2021 ended with a wave of deaths of moderate intensity related to the 5th wave of COVID-19. Overall, and after a notable increase in mortality in 2020 (+9.2%, 95%CI: +8.0%; +10.3%, compared to 2019, and +5.1%, 95%CI: +4.3%; +6.0%, compared to 2015-19), the pre-pandemic mortality level was approximately recovered in 2021 (+0.8%, 95%CI: -0.3%; +0.8%, compared to 2019, and -2.9%, 95%CI: -3.7%; -2.2%, compared to 2015-19). Life expectancy, after declining by 10 months for men and 6 months for women in 2020 (i.e. men would have lost 10 months and women 6 months had they lived their entire lives with COVID-19 as it was in 2020), returned in 2021 to 2019 levels for women (85.6 years) and regained 2018 levels for men (81.6 years, still -0.3 years from 2019). The age group responsible for the small remaining loss for men was the 50-70 age group, which had similar mortality in 2020 and 2021. The second year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland was characterized by an approximate return to pre-pandemic mortality levels, with a faster recovery for women than for men with respect to 2020

Mortality in Switzerland 2020-2021

In this report, we update previously published results on all-cause mortality in Switzerland in 2020 and extend them to the first half of 2021. Whereas mortality in Switzerland increased by 9.2% in 2020 compared with 2019 as a result of the first two waves of COVID-19, it decreased by about 10.8 % in the first half of 2021 compared with 2020, bringing the level of mortality in 2021 below that of 2019. In terms of life expectancy, we have gained about 3.1 months so far in 2021 in Switzerland compared to 2019, 6.0 months for women and 0.3 months for men. By mid-2021, women have therefore more than recovered the secular downward trend in mortality, i.e. an increase in life expectancy of about 2 months each year, while men are still slightly behind. A look at the weekly mortality data reveals that mortality levels in 2021 were consistently lower than those observed in previous years, with the exception of the first 4-6 weeks of 2021, corresponding to the end of the second wave of COVID-19. Notably, 2021 is the second consecutive year without a visible impact of influenza on mortality in Switzerland, and there was no third wave of mortality related to COVID-19. Therefore, 2021 is so far the best year ever regarding mortality in Switzerland. Résumé Dans ce rapport, nous mettons à jour les résultats précédemment publiés sur la mortalité toutes causes confondues en Suisse en 2020 et les étendons au premier semestre 2021. Alors que la mortalité en Suisse a augmenté de 9,2 % en 2020 par rapport à 2019 suite aux deux premières vagues de COVID-19, elle a diminué d'environ 10,8 % au premier semestre 2021 par rapport à 2020, ramenant le niveau de mortalité en 2021 en dessous de celui de 2019. En termes d'espérance de vie, nous avons gagné en Suisse environ 3,1 mois jusqu'à présent en 2021 par rapport à 2019, 6,0 mois pour les femmes et 0,3 mois pour les hommes. À la mi-2021, les femmes ont donc plus que récupéré la tendance séculaire à la baisse de la mortalité, soit une augmentation de l'espérance de vie d'environ 2 mois chaque année, alors que les hommes sont encore légèrement en retard. Une analyse des données hebdomadaires de mortalité révèle que les niveaux de mortalité en 2021 étaient systématiquement inférieurs à ceux observés les années précédentes, à l'exception des 4 à 6 premières semaines de 2021, correspondant à la fin de la deuxième vague de COVID-19. En particulier, 2021 est la deuxième année consécutive sans impact visible de la grippe sur la mortalité en Suisse, et nous n’avons pas observé de troisième vague de mortalité liée au COVID-19. Par conséquent, 2021 est jusqu'à présent la meilleure année jamais enregistrée en matière de mortalité en Suisse

A first analysis of excess mortality in Switzerland in 2020.

To quantify excess all-cause mortality in Switzerland in 2020, a key indicator for assessing direct and indirect consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using official data on deaths in Switzerland, all-cause mortality in 2020 was compared with that of previous years using directly standardized mortality rates, age- and sex-specific mortality rates, and life expectancy. The standardized mortality rate was 8.8% higher in 2020 than in 2019, returning to the level observed 5-6 years before, around the year 2015. This increase was greater for men (10.6%) than for women (7.2%) and was statistically significant only for men over 70 years of age, and for women over 75 years of age. The decrease in life expectancy in 2020 compared to 2019 was 0.7%, with a loss of 9.7 months for men and 5.3 months for women. There was an excess mortality in Switzerland in 2020, linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as this excess only concerned the elderly, the resulting loss of life expectancy was restricted to a few months, bringing the mortality level back to 2015

Active Unsupervised Texture Segmentation on a Diffusion Based Feature Space

In this report, we propose a novel and efficient approach for active unsurpervised texture segmentation. First, we show how we can extract a small set of good features for texture segmentation based on the structure tensor and nonlinear diffusion. Then, we propose a variational framework that allows to incorporate these features in a level set based unsupervised segmentation process that adaptively takes into account their estimated statistical information inside and outside the region to segment. Unlike features obtained by Gabor filters, our approach naturally leads to a significantly reduced number of feature channels. Thus, the supervised part of a texture segmentation algorithm, where the choice of good feature channels has to be learned in advance, can be omitted, and we get an efficient solution for unsupervised texture segmentation. The actual segmentation process based on the new features is an active and adaptative contour model that estimates dynamically probability density functions inside and outside a region and produces very convincing results. It is implemented using a fast level set based active contour technique and has been tested on various real textured images. The performance of the approach is favorably compared to recent studies

Authors' response to ‘Limitless longevity': The contribution of rectangularization to the secular increase in life expectancy: an empirical study

We thank our colleagues Modig et al.1 for their inter-est in our paper ‘The contribution of rectangulariza-tion to the secular increase of life expectancy: an empirical study’,2 and for raising substantial issues related to mortality among the oldest old persons. The authors are correct in pointing out that the maximum age at death depends partly on the size of the population at risk of dying, in that a larger number of people reaching old age will increase the probability of there being one single person with a very high age at death. It was for this very reason of buffering the effect of population size on extreme values that our paper used the 90th quantile as an indicator of longevity, rather than using the max-imum age at death. One should note that from a the