Author(s)

Tamie Sugawara, Yasushi Ohkusa^*

Infectious Disease Surveillance Center, National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan.

To elucidate the social effects of an influenza outbreak, the World Health Organization recommends a concept for excess mortality attributable to an influenza outbreak. However, because several models exist to estimate excess mortality, we would like to ascertain the most appropriate of three models: the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) model, the seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) model, and the National Institution of Infectious Diseases (NIID) model. Excess mortality is defined as the difference between the actual number of deaths and the epidemiological threshold. The epidemiological threshold is defined as upper bound of 95% confidence interval (CI) of the baseline. The actual number of deaths might be less than the baseline, which implies inconsistent with the definition of baseline. Especially, actual deaths fewer than the lower bound of 95% CI of baseline suggest the inappropriateness of a model of excess mortality. Among 123 months during epidemic periods, the NIID model found excess mortality in 56 months, CDC model in 31 months, and SARIMA model in 35 months. Conversely, the NIID model found negative excess mortality in only 2 months, but the CDC model and SARIMA model found it respectively for 10 and 33 months. Negative excess mortality represents the logical inconsistency of the model. Therefore, NIID model might be the best among the three models considered.

CDC Model, Excess Mortality, Influenza, NIID Model, SARIMA

Sugawara, T. and Ohkusa, Y. (2019) Comparison of Models for Excess Mortality of Influenza Applied to Japan. Journal of Biosciences and Medicines, 7, 13-23. doi: 10.4236/jbm.2019.76002.