A groundbreaking study using high-resolution satellite imagery to analyse graveyards has found that deaths have nearly doubled in Aden, the centre of Yemen’s coronavirus outbreak.

The discovery has given a sense of the true scale of the havoc the pandemic has wreaked on the vulnerable country.

The research, not yet peer-reviewed but released on Wednesday, was done by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the geospatial analysis specialists Satellite Applications Catapult.

Researchers used satellite pictures, official data sources and interviews with researchers in Aden city to quantify burial activity across all the identifiable cemeteries within Aden governorate.

Between April and September 2020 there were about 2,100 excess deaths in the area, against an expected baseline of about 1,300 deaths, the study found.

The findings represent the first significant quantitative data on Yemen’s Covid-19 outbreak, and should assist pandemic response planning and other vital humanitarian interventions. A similar project by the same team is under way in Somalia.

Lead author Emilie Koum Besson from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: “In a context like Yemen statistics are unreliable or just projections, and even actors on the ground have difficulty collecting accurate data.

“You can say x or y about the pandemic, but if there’s no data for it you can’t really know the impact. Using satellite imagery to create public health data is a very new science and we hope it will prove to be useful in places affected by conflict.”

Yemen, which the UN says has experienced the world’s worst humanitarian crisis since the conflict between Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the Saudi-led coalition fighting to restore Yemen’s government broke out five years ago, has been particularly susceptible to the coronavirus pandemic.