Excess mortality associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in Latvia: a population-level analysis of all-cause and noncommunicable disease deaths in 2020.

BACKGROUND: Age-standardised noncommunicable disease (NCD) mortality and the proportion of the elderly population in Latvia are high, while public health and health care systems are underresourced. The emerging COVID-19 pandemic raised concerns about its detrimental impact on all-cause and noncommunicable disease mortality in Latvia. We estimated the timing and number of excess all-cause and cause-specific deaths in 2020 in Latvia due to COVID-19 and selected noncommunicable diseases. METHODS: A time series analysis of all-cause and cause-specific weekly mortality from COVID-19, circulatory diseases, malignant neoplasms, diabetes mellitus, and chronic lower respiratory diseases from the National Causes of Death Database from 2015 to 2020 was used by applying generalised additive modelling (GAM) and joinpoint regression analysis. RESULTS: Between weeks 14 and 52 (from 1 April to 29 December) of 2020, a total of 3111 excess deaths (95% PI 1339 - 4832) were estimated in Latvia, resulting in 163.77 excess deaths per 100 000. Since September 30, with the outbreak of the second COVID-19 wave, 55% of all excess deaths have occurred. Altogether, COVID-19-related deaths accounted for only 28% of the estimated all-cause excess deaths. A significant increase in excess mortality was estimated for circulatory diseases (68.91 excess deaths per 100 000). Ischemic heart disease and cerebrovascular disease were listed as the underlying cause in almost 60% of COVID-19-contributing deaths. CONCLUSIONS: All-cause mortality and mortality from circulatory diseases significantly increased in Latvia during the first pandemic year. All-cause excess mortality substantially exceeded reported COVID-19-related deaths, implying COVID-19-related mortality during was significantly underestimated. Increasing mortality from circulatory diseases suggests a negative cumulative effect of COVID-19 exposure and reduced access to healthcare services for NCD patients.

Numerical Response of Owls to the Dampening of Small Mammal Population Cycles in Latvia.

Strong numerical and functional responses of owls to voles in cyclic environments are well known. However, there is insufficient knowledge from the boreonemoral region in particular, with depleted populations of small mammals. In this study, we describe the dynamics of the small mammal population in Latvia from 1991 to 2016 and link them to owl population characteristics. We used food niche breadth, number of fledglings, and population trends to lay out the numerical response of six owl species to dampened small mammal population cycles. We found temporarily increasing food niche breadth in tawny and Ural owls. There were no other responses in the tawny owl, whereas the breeding performance of three forest specialist species-pygmy, Tengmalm's, and Ural owls-corresponded to the vole crash years in Fennoscandia. Moreover, the populations of forest specialist owls decreased, and the change in the Ural owl population can be attributed to the depletion of small mammal populations. We found evidence of a carry-over effect in the eagle owl arising from a strong correlation of declining breeding performance with the small mammal abundance indices in the previous autumn. We conclude that dampening of the small mammal population cycles is an important covariate of the likely effects of habitat destruction that needs to be investigated further, with stronger responses in more specialized (to prey or habitat) species.

Ecogeographical variable dataset for species distribution modelling, describing forest landscape in Latvia, 2017.

In this article, we provide access to, and information on the production of 42 ecogeographical variables (EGVs) used to describe the landscape of Latvia at three scales (local and two landscape). Layers are focused on the description of forest heterogeneity, but account for other ecosystems and land cover types as well. The more temporarily changing land use and land cover (LULC) types as forest and agricultural lands are described from 2017 databases. With most of the other LULC information was gathered from the topographic map (2016) at the scale of 1:10 000. All the raster layers provided here are in the Latvian projected coordinate reference system (epsg:3059) with a grid cell size of 25 ha. Each layer provides quantitative information on the area, shape, and edge of habitat classes and additionally, age, time since the last forestry disturbance, relative soil humidity, relative soil richness etc. for forests. The three scales represent information from within 25 ha grid cell, and two radii - 1250 and 2500 m - around the centre of the grid cell.