How can mortality be assessed in countries where only a few people have access to healthcare and death registries are not maintained? Obtaining reliable data on the number of deaths in low-income countries is the task undertaken by an international team of experts working with the WHO. The team also includes a researcher from Wroclaw Medical University – Dr Andrzej Jarynowski.
On Thursday, 30 October, Wroclaw Medical University will host an outstanding public health specialist from Ghana and WHO Pandemic Hub collaborator. At the invitation of the Faculty of Health Sciences, Dr Jonathan Mawutor Gmanyami will deliver a lecture on methods for determining the true number of deaths where official sources of information fail. The WHO expert has been collaborating for years with Dr Andrzej Jarynowski from the Department of Innovation in Healthcare at the Faculty of Health Sciences.
“As a team, we deal with measuring what is often invisible in official statistics,” says Dr Andrzej Jarynowski. “One example is excess mortality related to the COVID-19 pandemic in countries of the Global South, where registries are incomplete or do not exist at all. In countries such as Ghana, only about 20 percent of the population has access to hospital care. There are also no universal death registries, which means that mortality data during the pandemic had very little to do with reality. Our goal is to better prepare for future pandemics – to detect waves of infection more quickly, plan resources more accurately and initiate support measures earlier.”
How can deaths be counted when standard sources such as hospital records, death registries or censuses cannot be relied on? Researchers use unconventional methods, and their work is reminiscent of a criminal investigation. They analyse social networks where they track obituaries, mentions of deaths and mourning to detect sudden spikes in time and space. Satellite images of cemeteries are also examined, enabling them to count new graves and estimate the dynamics of burials. Scientists also go into the field to conduct in-person interviews at clinical research sites and epidemiological surveillance points. They ask about year-to-year deaths in families to capture unusual increases.
“Combining these pathways in a statistical model makes it possible to obtain a reliable picture of mortality where standard demography cannot reach,” explains the Wroclaw Medical University researcher. “Thanks to these studies, we were able to determine, for example, that countries of the Global South were hit harder by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. The pandemic showed how important disease modelling is for public health decisions. At the same time, unconventional methods of uncovering the truth about deaths are applicable beyond epidemiology. I am currently involved in analyses of actual war losses and the occurrence of infection clusters among Russian soldiers, carried out for the defence needs of the Republic of Poland. In this area too, one cannot rely solely on official statistics.”
Dr Andrzej Jarynowski has completed two educational and medical missions in Ghana, while Jonathan Gmanyami regularly travels to Europe – he was a G-WAC programme fellow and is currently a visitor at the WHO Pandemic Hub. Together with the Wroclaw Medical University researcher, he integrates non-standard data with classical epidemiological surveillance and health policy, and contributes to projects on modelling tropical diseases (such as mpox and malaria), snakebites, telemedicine applications and advanced artificial intelligence techniques – all to strengthen global preparedness for future pandemics.
Jonathan Mawutor Gmanyami will deliver an open lecture at Wroclaw Medical University on 30 October, titled “WHO Pandemic Hub and the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine: science, data and people in support of global resilience to future pandemics.”The event is organised by the Faculty of Health Sciences and will take place at 12:00, Chałubińskiego 3, room 1.25 (1st floor). Admission is free.
About the lecturer:
Jonathan Mawutor Gmanyami is a recognised public health specialist in Ghana and a collaborator of the WHO Pandemic Hub. In 2025 he defended his PhD on excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in low- and middle-income countries. His scientific output includes research on health system resilience, epidemiological surveillance and the use of artificial intelligence in biosurveillance, making him one of the leading young scholars in global health in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Photo: Private archive