A KRAP Review of Excess Deaths in Australia
Anything but the vaccine.
I recently read an interesting article in The Conversation written by Adrian Esterman - Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of South Australia titled:
Thousands more Australians died in 2022 than expected. COVID was behind the majority of them. Published: December 12, 2022 3.15pm AEDT Updated: December 15, 2022 3.01pm AEDT.
The actual article itself is not that interesting on it’s own but the two reports it quotes are well worth looking at:
Last month, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released a report of mortality statistics. It showed that from January to July 2022, there were 17% more deaths (16,375) than the average expected for these months.
and
Last week, the Australian Actuaries Institute released its report looking at excess deaths. Actuaries are statisticians who specialise in assessing risk, and most often work for insurance companies, superannuation funds, banks or government departments.
The ABS report has been covered by many elsewhere and probably not worth rehashing here, but the report by the Australian Actuaries Institute COVID-19 Mortality Working Group – Excess mortality continues in August 2022 - 7 December 2022 is new to me and a great read for any data nerds out there. I plan to have a more detailed look at it shortly, especially Western Australia that has an interesting pattern in excess deaths that appear to match the vaccine roll-out, but it’s too early for me to make an informed assessment either way.
Interestingly, he (Esterman) gives the impression he’s using the latest data by saying “last month” but doesn’t report on the latest ABS report which shows a higher number of deaths but pretty much the same percentage increase. Possibly he actually wrote his article in November before the latest ABS data was available, but he uses “last week” for the actuarial report indicating that he probably wrote the article in December, so he should have had the latest ABS data available when he wrote it. I’m unable to find where they got the 8,200 COVID deaths from. The excess deaths are likely to continue to rise and COVID deaths are falling, so it looks like they may have tweaked it a bit to get a good headline.
Just over half of the excess mortality – 8,200 deaths, are deaths from COVID. Another 2,100 deaths are deaths with COVID. The remaining excess of 5,100 deaths makes no mention of COVID on the death certificate.
The latest ABS data shows:
In 2022, there were 128,797 deaths that occurred by 31 August and were registered by 31 October. This is 18,671 deaths (17.0%) more than the baseline average.
Between January and August 2022 there have been 7,727 deaths due to COVID-19 that were certified by a doctor. 1,061 of these deaths occurred in August.
The actuarial Working Group has also examined excess mortality by age/gender and by state/territory. In so doing, they have used additional data from the ABS in relation to COVID-19 deaths registered by 30 September 2022, namely:
The number of deaths each week both from COVID-19 and with COVID-19, broken down by age/gender; and
The number of deaths from COVID-19 broken down by state/territory, noting that no information is available for deaths with COVID-19 broken down by state.
The age/gender data referred to above was provided to them privately by the ABS, while the state data comes from the ABS article COVID-19 Mortality by wave published on 16 November 2022.
Actuarial Report Summary:
Total excess mortality for the month of August is estimated at 10% (+1,700 deaths) relative to expected mortality at pre-pandemic levels. This is lower than recent months, primarily due to lower-than-expected respiratory deaths following the earlier-than-normal end to the flu season.
Total excess mortality for the first eight months of 2022 is 13% (+15,400 deaths).
Just over half of the excess mortality for the first eight months of 2022 is due to deaths from COVID-19 (+8,200 deaths), with another +2,100 due to deaths with COVID-19, and the remaining excess of +5,100 with no mention of COVID-19 on the death certificate.
While in sheer number terms the excess mortality is concentrated in older age groups (i.e. 65+ years), excess mortality is a significant percentage in all age groups in 2022.
Most states and territories have had broadly similar levels of excess mortality in 2022, but the delayed re-opening of WA’s borders is reflected in a delayed uplift in mortality.
We continue to expect that COVID-19 will be the third leading cause of death in Australia in 2022.
Somehow they seem to have increased the number of COVID deaths to 8,200 and reduced the total of excess deaths to 15,400 (by making a population adjustment) to get COVID deaths to just squeeze it over the line (53%) to claim a “majority” of excess deaths are due to COVID.
That’s all well and good, lets say that COVID was the cause of about half the excess deaths whether it was the majority or minority is beside the point. This still leaves about half the excess deaths unexplained. The lack of curiosity astounds me. The actuarial report is great work but as they note in their disclaimer, they “are not medical professionals, public health specialists or epidemiologists. This note is based on publicly available information and our general observations on that data.”
Esterman writes, “The actuaries’ report gives the following possible explanations for excess deaths not listed as from or with COVID.” However, he conveniently leaves out that the actuarial report mentions vaccine-related deaths as a possible cause (they classify it as a low impact). It’s also interesting that there are no longer any comments in the comment section of The Converstaion’s COVID articles, they’re open for comment but it appears no one is interested in making any comments.🤔
Perhaps, professors of biostatistics and epidemiology should be looking into these excess deaths with a bit more priority and rigor rather than just reporting on the work of others.
Hey, good news everybody!
We’ve only killed an extra 13% of Australians, not the 17% we previously thought.
If you like this sort of stuff, you might also want to check out the excellent article below by Norman Fenton and Martin Neil looking at Excess Mortality in selected countries around the world.
Good article here at the Spectator:
https://spectator.com.au/2023/01/pandemic-survivors-and-the-silent-victims-of-excess-mortality/
You’re on to something with Western Australia excess deaths due to them having nearly zero Covid before the vaccines & also they had maybe 3 day’s lockdown possibly twice. So the excess deaths from lockdown CAN NOT be possible. I only mentioned this yesterday to someone else!