The total number of deaths from the Los Angeles fires of early 2025 is far higher than the official count of fatalities, researchers have found.

The death toll from the Eaton and Palisades fires that burned Los Angeles communities in January recently rose to 31 after officials discovered a body more than six months after the disaster.

The deaths of numerous people who died from the fires’ effects in the immediate aftermath, however, would raise the fires’ death toll to 440, according to the recently published study. Researchers from Helsinki, Finland, and Boston, Massachusetts, looked into all deaths within Los Angeles County between Jan. 5 and Feb. 1 to find how many excess deaths the wildfires caused.

The researchers included partially attributable deaths, like those from lung or heart conditions worsened by smoke or stress, and indirect deaths, like disruptions to health systems and mental health impacts. They then compared those deaths to data from 2018, 2019, and 2024, excluding the years from 2020 to 2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The researchers found there were 6,371 deaths observed during the fires and in the immediate aftermath of the fires, compared with the 5,931 expected deaths based on previous years.

Eugenio Paglino, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Demography and Population Health, told Wildfire Today that part of the reason why excess deaths aren’t included in the death tolls of wildfires or other natural disasters is because of the numerous difficulties associated with calculating excess deaths, specifically the variability in weekly deaths.

“While observed deaths can be obtained from public data repositories, expected deaths have to be modeled based on pre-disaster mortality trends,” Paglino said. “This modeling is subject to uncertainty and in the case of elevated temporal frequency (e.g. weekly data) and relatively small populations (even in LA weekly deaths are around 1,000) the week-to-week variability can be elevated. This variability makes statistical modeling challenging.”

However, Paglino and the other researchers are hopeful that their research will act as a framework to guide future efforts in the aftermath of disasters. Click here to read the full study.