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European countries have reported that more than 10,000 people have died during a record-breaking heat wave that engulfed the western continent in late June, official data said.
The majority – more than 9,000 – were among people aged 65 and over, according to data published by EuroMOMO, a network supported by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control and the World Health Organization.
Extreme heat can kill by causing heat stroke, or increase cardiovascular disease, with the elderly among the most vulnerable.
“To have this kind of excess at this time of year is unusual. It's really high,” Lasse Vestergaard, senior physician at Denmark's Statens Serum Institut, which runs EuroMOMO, told Reuters.
“It's hard to explain this mass killing by anything other than extreme heat.”
France reported nearly 1,000 deaths last week as the heatwave spread across Europe. The numbers are expected to rise as more data is collected.
Scientists said the late June heatwave “would not have happened” without human-caused climate change, which is making heat waves more frequent and more intense.
The data, compiled from national death statistics in 27 European countries, includes excess deaths from all causes, not just heat-related, during the week of June 22 to 28, when the heat wave rises in France, Spain, Britain and other countries.
But scientists say there are no known major factors, such as the COVID-19 outbreak, that could have contributed to the more than 10,650 deaths that week.
The same deaths in European countries combined in the last eight weeks were, on average, about 500 deaths per week below normal levels. EuroMOMO data may be updated in the coming weeks as more data comes in.
Extreme heat at the end of June disrupted electricity, closed schools and broke heat records in France, Spain and the UK.
Much of western Europe saw another hot day on Saturday amid a deadly heat wave that has already broken heat records in Britain, France and Spain. The heat is moving eastward across the continent, with one expert warning that Switzerland's glaciers will lose a lot of ice due to the heat wave.
EuroMOMO does not publish country-by-country death tolls, but noted that France and Belgium were the only two countries in Europe to post “very high” death tolls in the last week of June.
The number of deaths in Belgium was the highest for any temperature in records dating back to 2000, according to the country's public health center Sciensano.
A separate scientific study, published on Monday, estimated that 2,700 people died of heat-related causes in England and Wales alone, during the heat of May and June.
Of those deaths, 42 percent were caused by increased temperatures caused by global warming, according to findings by Imperial College London, the UK Met Office and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
