This article explains the difference between morbidity and mortality. It also takes a look at ways to prevent morbidities and protect your health. Morbidity is any condition that isn't healthy. It can refer to mental or physical illness. Morbidity often refers to chronic long-term and age-related diseases.
These conditions can worsen over time and lower your quality of life. A person with high morbidity may not live as long as someone who is healthy. However, morbidity doesn't always mean you are in danger of dying right away. If an illness gets worse over time, it could raise your risk of mortality. When an epidemiologist uses the term mortality, it usually means the number of deaths caused by an event or illness over a specific period of time. Researchers often talk about "mortality rates. For example, an illness might cause " deaths per , people per year.
Co-morbidity means that a person has more than one illness. Co-morbid conditions don't always have the same cause, but they may occur together and worsen each other. For example, obesity , depression , and diabetes are often co-morbid. But these health conditions don't necessarily have the same cause.
Morbidity and mortality aren't the same thing. Morbidity is an illness or loss of function in your body or mind. Mortality means death. Someone can have several morbidities at the same time. Morbidities don't necessarily cause death. Seven of the 10 leading causes of death are chronic or long-term diseases. These morbidities raise your risk of mortality.
The number of people with chronic or long-term diseases stays about the same. In recent years, though, there has been an uptick in infectious diseases. More infectious disease means morbidity numbers are rising. When an event or a disease causes more deaths than expected, it's called "excess mortality. Even within a country, official statistics can vary according to what you count. In the UK, for example, the Department of Health and Social Care releases daily updates on how many people who tested positive for Covid died that day.
This includes any patient who tested positive for Covid but who might have died from another condition for example, terminal cancer. Adding to the complexity of trying to understand the death rates is that the two are out of sync, since the ONS way of counting can only happen after a death certificate has been issued, so takes longer. This is not necessarily a source of discrepancy between most countries, though, as many are counting deaths in the same way. Italy counts any death of a patient who has Covid as a death caused by Covid; so does Germany and Hong Kong.
At present in the US, any death of a Covid patient, no matter what the physician believes to be the direct cause, is counted for public reporting as a Covid death.
The picture is murkier still when patients have not had a Covid test, but are a suspected case. Given that many deaths from Covid are in people who have underlying health issues , doctors still have to make the call on the cause of death. The picture is even more complicated when patients have not had a Covid test, but are a suspected case Credit: Getty Images. During an epidemic, doctors are more likely to attribute a death with complex causes as being caused by the disease in question — a trait known as ascertainment bias.
One example is the H1N1 pandemic of , known as swine flu. Early case fatality rate estimates were inflated by a factor of more than Even 10 weeks into the epidemic, estimates varied widely between countries, coming in between 0. When medics later had a chance to go through case documents and evaluate cases, the actual H1N1 case death rate was far lower, at 0. But it could be an antidote to some of the alarm at the very high reported death rates in some countries. While over-counting deaths among recorded Covid cases may lead to overestimation of the death rate, there is another factor that could mean the death rate is also — confusingly — being underestimated at the same time.
This is the problem of hidden deaths from Covid those people who die from the disease who are never tested.
In the small Italian town of Nembro, in Lombardy, only 31 people have officially died from Covid Ordinarily, around 35 people die in the first months of the year in Nembro. Therefore, the number of prevalent cases is the total number of cases of disease existing in a population.
A prevalence rate is the total number of cases of a disease existing in a population divided by the total population. So, if a measurement of cancer is taken in a population of 40, people and 1, were recently diagnosed with cancer and 3, are living with cancer, then the prevalence of cancer is 0.
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What is mortality? What are the most common causes of death in the United States? What is excess mortality? The bottom line. Read this next. Medically reviewed by Deborah Weatherspoon, Ph.
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