by Will Jones, Daily Sceptic:
The “incredibly high” excess death rate in 2022 should be urgently investigated by the Government, Australia’s top actuarial body has said.
According to new analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data by the Actuaries Institute, there were 15,400 excess deaths during the first eight months of the year, with around one third having no link to Covid.
This is 13% higher than expected, which is an “incredibly high number for mortality” according to Karen Cutter, spokeswoman for the institute’s COVID-19 Mortality Working Group. It is “not clear” what is driving the increase, she said. “Mortality doesn’t normally vary by more than 1-2%, so 13% is way higher than normal level.”
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“I’m not aware [of anything comparable] in the recent past but I haven’t gone back and looked [historically]. They talk about the flu season of 2017 being really bad, and the mortality there was 1% higher than normal. So it’s well outside the range of normal.”
According to the raw data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there were 128,797 deaths from January 1st to August 31st, which was 18,671 or 17% higher than the historical average. Of those, 7,727 or 41% were attributed to Covid, leaving 10,944 non-Covid excess deaths.
The reason for the difference between the raw ABS data and the actuary figures is that, unlike with ONS data in the U.K. which use a five-year average baseline, the actuaries use a modelled baseline for calculating excess deaths. This aims to take into account trends like an ageing and growing population and improving health outcomes. The actuaries acknowledge that, compared to using the 2015-19 baseline, this results in a higher baseline and thus fewer excess deaths.
The Actuaries Institute found that around 8,200 deaths, or just over half the excess, were due to Covid as underlying cause and a further 2,100 deaths were ‘with’ Covid as a contributory cause. They added the two together to give their final figure for non-Covid excess of 5,100, or around one third. Why they chose to include deaths where the underlying cause was not COVID-19 in the ‘Covid deaths’, and exclude them from the analysis of excess non-Covid deaths is not clear. Between that and the potentially mistaken raising of the baseline via modelling and the total number of excess deaths may be considerably and artificially diminished. The effect is to cut the proportion of excess deaths that are non-Covid almost in half, from 59% in the raw data to 33% in the actuaries’ analysis.
In any case, whatever the merits of these methods, the actuaries’ breakdown by cause of death is illuminating. According to the Actuaries Institute, 3,110 of the 8,010 non-Covid excess deaths were from “other unspecified” causes, which is 11% above the expected number, and 1,490 were from ischaemic heart disease, which is 17% above the expected number. Cerebrovascular disease (stroke) contributed 490 deaths, 8% above expected. Other cardiovascular causes were unfortunately not stated either by the actuaries or ABS, but were presumably included in the “other unspecified diseases”.
The actuaries state that deaths from respiratory disease other than COVID-19 have been significantly lower than expected throughout the pandemic (presumably owing to displacement by COVID-19). Cancer, diabetes, heart disease and stroke as a group have been the largest contributor to non-Covid excess deaths in 2021 and 2022, they state.
