Excess Death and Covid-19
What does high excess mortality mean and what does it imply about the pandemic and New Brunswick's response.
One year ago, we wrote on the available data regarding excess deaths in New Brunswick during the Delta wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. At that time, metrics had been published which suggested dramatic undercounting of Covid-19 mortality, obfuscated information, and incompetent or wilfully negligent leadership. We are a year older and we have another year of Statistics Canada metrics.
Based on decades of data, Statistics Canada predicts the typical number of deaths the country and provinces are likely to see during a given week. Reported deaths above this predicted number are considered “excess.” Continued weeks of large excess mortality are considered abnormal.
It should be noted that predicted mortality numbers take into account the demographics of a population. They account for ageing, population growth, and other contextual factors. This is important to know since minimizing rhetoric often seeks to dismiss unfavourable excess mortality by claiming it does not consider these factors.
Recently, we have seen media coverage of the provisional 2022 death statistics for New Brunswick, calling the 14.5% increase over the previous year “stunning.” At the time we wrote on the mortality data for the 2021 Delta wave, it was unheard of to see week after week of large excess death. Now the 2022 numbers dwarf those of the previous year.
When hearing of exceptional levels of “excess death”, one may be inclined to assume it is simply due to the now fully normalized pandemic and leave it at that. While reported Covid-19 deaths certainly contribute to elevated excess mortality, they do not account for all of it.
We can see that beginning with the original Delta wave, New Brunswick has experienced quantities of death (solid line) consistently well above projections (dashed line). How many of these more-than-anticipated deaths have been attributed to the ongoing pandemic?
Following multiple retroactive revisions and significant lags in reporting, PoPNB submitted a Right to Information request for daily totals of Covid-19 related deaths for the entirety of the pandemic. With this accurate data we can compare reported Covid-19 deaths with the number of deaths in excess of projections.
We can see that for a portion of the pandemic between March 2022 and July 2022, Covid-19 deaths can be said to largely account for excess mortality, before the two metrics become entirely decoupled with excess deaths far exceeding deaths attributed to Covid-19.
In fact, during the Delta, early Omicron, and BA.5 waves, a significant quantity of excess death remains unexplained. Over the period shown above, 1,668 excess deaths occurred, 1,121 of which are not currently linked to Covid-19.
When asked for comments, the New Brunswick Department of Health had the familiar response of “we don’t know.”
This echoes the confident denials provided in May 2022 by then Minister of Health Dorothy Shephard.
Despite there being “no reason to believe more people died from Covid-19 in New Brunswick last summer and fall than the government has reported,” many more people did die from Covid-19 than were reported by the government. 38% more.
Shown above are the number of Covid-19 deaths reported at the time (grey) and the number of Covid-19 deaths which were later confirmed to have occurred (red). In May when Shephard vehemently defended her department’s Covid accounting, the province had reported 419 deaths. That number was 161 deaths shy of the actual total at that time, later confirmed to be 580; a quantity which mirrors reported excess deaths much more closely.
Considering the current abysmal state of tracing and testing, particularly as compared to this time a year ago, it turns out we have every reason to believe that more of us are dying from Covid-19 than are being reported.
Detractors will attempt to soothe their cognitive dissonance with claims that New Brunswick experienced a population jump between 2021 and 2022, and/or that New Brunswick has an ageing population so mortality is bound to increase.
In 2021, New Brunswick was home to approximately 790,398 individuals. That increased to approximately 812,061 in 2022. A population increase of 2.7%.
In 2021, New Brunswick lost 8,037 people and in 2022 that number increased to 9,486. This equates to a death rate of 10.2 per 1000 people (1 out of every 98 people) in 2021 and 11.7 per 1000 people (1 out of every 86 people) in 2022. An increase of 14.9%.
Population growth is not the root cause of the increase in excess death. The relative increase in the rate of death is over five times that of the relative increase in population.
As for ageing population, the average age in New Brunswick actually decreased between 2021 and 2022. The proportion of the population younger than 55 increased by 0.34% and consequently the proportion 55 and older decreased by that amount. So while there are indeed more elderly citizens in New Brunswick, their share of the population declined while the overall death rate increased 14.9%.
Population age can not be the root cause of the increase in excess death. The population is getting younger.
The current government continues to concern itself solely with its efforts to redefine a pervasive structural issue as a problem that affects a negligible subset of individuals; a conveniently dismissible group of “other people.”
Our ability to act is proportional to our ability to know, learn, and care. The province has done its best to hinder the public’s ability to know and to learn, fostering wide-ranging disinterest toward caring and acting, and that lack of action is borne out as an ever increasing magnitude of loss.
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