The Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s government agency for disease control and prevention, announced on Thursday its latest estimates that extreme heatwaves have killed around 15,800 people in the country so far this year.
Publish dateThursday 27 August 2026 - 17:23
Story Code : 364083
Afghan Voice Agency (AVA) - International Service: This figure, which comes as the end of August approaches, breaks previous historical records and is estimated to be more than 6,000 more than the 2018 death toll (9,500 people).
According to the report, most of the deaths were due to the unprecedented heatwave at the end of June, where around 9,600 people died in the week ending June 28. The average weekly temperature at that time reached 26.4 degrees Celsius, and temperatures in some parts of Germany exceeded 41 degrees for the first time. Around 4,000 deaths were also recorded in the first two weeks of August.
The Robert Koch Institute has stressed that these estimates are “conservative” and that the actual number of victims may be higher, as heat is rarely mentioned as a direct cause of death on death certificates and fatalities are often attributed to a combination of heat and underlying diseases (such as heart, lung and kidney diseases). More than half of the fatalities (around 7,960) were people over 85, highlighting the extreme vulnerability of the elderly to heatwaves.
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