@pollar.news: On 13 August Germany's Robert Koch Institute put this summer's heat-related deaths at about 12,500, 95% prediction interval 11,200 to 13,600. It covers April to 2 August. Nobody counted them. Heat is almost never written as the underlying cause on a German death certificate. As a direct cause it is recorded about 21 times a year, 2004 to 2024. What Germany counts is deaths. Every Tuesday the statistics office publishes how many people died, nine days later, and never says why. Third week of June: 18,199. The week after: 24,341. It normally moves by a few hundred a week. Neither count is final: not every local office has reported, so the last nine weeks are estimates, and both of these are among them. The institute modelled that week twice. Once with the temperatures that happened: 23,408. Once with them capped at about 20 °C: 17,762. The estimate is the gap. 5,646, what is left when one model is taken from another. Heat does not stop when the week does: one hot week acts on that week and the three after. The current report attributes about 9,600 of them to the last week of June. The report before it said that same 9,600 covered two weeks. German newsrooms ran it as one, in the institute's own words. The institute does not break out single weeks; its curves put 5,646 in the first and about 3,900 in the second, about three quarters of the summer. Twenty degrees is a choice: it is where the institute put zero. Fewest people die at about 17.5, and from there its full-year figure rises by about 1,200 in the median year, 1992 to 2024. It can say roughly who: half is people of 85 and over. It cannot say which ones. Any single death that week might have happened anyway. That is not a flaw in the method. That is the method. Sources: RKI, Wochenbericht zur hitzebedingten Mortalität KW 31 and KW 30/2026 (DOI 10.25646/14318, 10.25646/14315); RKI Epid. Bulletin 19/2025; Destatis Sterbefallzahlen; PD26_N045_231. #Germany #Heatwave #PublicHealth #Statistics

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Monday 17 August 2026 08:46:38 GMT