COVID-19 Mortality Australia (Victoria and NSW Over-Represented)

Today we’ll be looking at this report released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics titled, “COVID-19 Mortality in Australia: Deaths registered until 31 October 2022”. This is the latest data and was released today on the 25th November 2022, noting that these are just provisional numbers. The ABS expects to receive further registrations for this period.

Here’s a chart of COVID deaths by age and sex. Unsurprisingly, people aged 70 and older make up the vast majority of deaths, although there are significant numbers in the 50 to 69 year-old category. One thing that stands out in this graph are the number of male deaths. They are significantly higher in almost all age categories. I’m not sure why. The report doesn’t go into any detail.

In this table, we can see the number and proportion of COVID deaths by state. I thought it would be interesting to compare these proportions with the proportions of the population of each state. Here’s the latest population figures from the ABS. I’ve just worked out the proportion for each state of the total population of Australia. Now let’s move these numbers back onto the previous table. For example, we can see that Queensland has significantly less COVID deaths to what you would expect based on population alone at 13.9% which is 6.6 percentage points lower. So Queensland is underrepresented in terms of COVID deaths. South Australia is also underrepresented at -1.3 percentage points. As is Western Australia at -6.4, Tasmania -0.6, Northern Territory at -0.7, ACT -0.4. Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales, is slightly over-represented at +4.5 percentage point, which means more people died from COVID than you would expect based on population figures alone. But the standout, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Victoria with an extra 11.5 percentage points than expected. We would expect roughly 25% of COVID deaths to be in Victoria, however, in actuality, they have had 37% of the deaths, very much an over-representation. As many of you would know, Victoria suffered some of the harshest lockdowns in Australia, if not the world, so some might think it unusual that there have been so many COVID deaths in Victoria.

This table from the report outlines the number of deaths that had associated conditions. 95.4% of deaths due to COVID-19 had other conditions listed on the death certificate. According to the report, conditions listed in the causal sequence (the chain of events leading to death) are conditions that were caused by COVID and its complications. Noting that on average, deaths due to COVID had 3.1 other diseases and conditions certified alongside the virus. It should be noted that only 4.6% of death certificates reported COVID alone.

Here’s a chart showing the major pre-existing chronic conditions in people who died from COVID, noting that 79.8% of death certificates showed at least one pre-existing chronic condition. 39% of these people had chronic cardiac problems. 30.5% had dementia. 17.8% had pre-existing respiratory issues, with cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, and hypertension also presenting quite frequently.

Here’s a table of the country of birth of those who have died from COVID in Australia. If you look at the age-standardised death rate, people who were born overseas were 1.6 times more likely to die from COVID than Australian-born people. Although, both groups still had a median age at death which was greater than Australia’s life expectancy.

Out of the 13,000 COVID deaths reported, 2,401 people officially died with COVID rather than directly from the virus itself. These deaths are referred to as COVID-related deaths in the report. Of these COVID-related deaths, 99.6% occurred during the Delta and Omicron waves. To me that sounds like at the start of the pandemic, officials were probably labelling any COVID-related death as a COVID death, but that’s just a presumption on my part. I don’t know for sure.

The most common underlying causes of these COVID-related deaths were cancer, circulatory system diseases (heart disease), and dementia. The fourth one in this table I found a bit funny – Falls. What does that exactly mean? Does that mean because of COVID, somebody had a fall? Were they coughing so hard that they fell over? Or perhaps they became light-headed? How was this diagnosed exactly? I don’t know.

And finally, COVID deaths by month and year. This is just a graph I created from the data. You can see that there were peaks in August 2020, October 2021, January 2022, and July 2022. Since then, COVID deaths seem to have decreased substantially, but as we know, there are still excess non-COVID deaths in Australia, which we’ll have to talk about in another video.

Anyway, that was a brief overview of the latest COVID-related mortality data coming out of Australia. I believe Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is up for re-election tomorrow. I’m not Victorian, so I will not comment on that at this stage.

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