LAUSR

To the Editor: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly become a great global infection and brought about a wide range of health consequences, including a high number of deaths due to continuous spread. [1] Wu et al [2] reported that the changes in mortality were heteroge-neous across different countries, and this resultantly restricts the common measure of COVID-19 mortality to the particular outcome of in-hospital death and can therefore be regarded as incomplete. In China, the status of COVID-19 has varied from outbreak to proactive prevention due to comprehensive countermeasures such as maintaining social distance and wearing surgical masks. Meanwhile, investigation with community-based samples should contribute to clarifying the doubt about mortality in out-hospital deaths. Moreover, the impact of the pandemic situation on unnatural death remains unclear, particularly about suicide. This may illustrate the adverse effect of the epidemic on people ’ s state of mind. A retrospective study was designed to analyze the characteristics of all deaths that occurred outside hospitals to obtain a full overview of the broader impact, as well as to lend further plausibility to the speci fi city of fatal associations according to the need to study all-cause mortality. Deaths that occurred