17% More Australian Deaths Than Normal (Jan – Aug 2022)

We take a look at the latest Provisional Mortality Statistics released by the Australia Bureau of Statistics on 25 November 2022, noting that the reference period is January through to the end of August this year. I suppose the key headline is that “In 2022, there were 128,797 deaths that occurred by 31 August and were registered by 31 October, which is 18,671 (17.0%) more than the historical average”.

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provisional-mortality-statistics/jan-aug-2022

For this video, I’m going to go straight to the data downloads so that I can analyse the data directly. Specifically, I’ll be downloading this one, “Provisional Mortality Statistics, Monthly Dashboard, Jan-Aug 2022”.

Opening that up, we see that there are four tables of data including total deaths and age-standardised death rates.

This is Table 2.1 that shows total deaths compared with baseline averages by age, sex, and state of registration. I’ll be graphing a lot of this to make it easier to comprehend.

Here’s a graph showing the total deaths for 2022 so far shown in red. The orange line represents the baseline average, which is the average number of deaths between 2017 and 2021 excluding 2020. According to the ABS, deaths in 2020 were significantly lower than expected, and therefore their inclusion would significantly lower the average and therefore would artificially indicate higher than expected mortality. But even with that exclusion, we can see there are still significant excess deaths for every month this year. If we take out the COVID deaths, as many statisticians are doing, then we can still see that every month has experienced excess deaths. These excess deaths are not occurring due to COVID, well, at least not that we know of.

This is the same data, but shown using the Age-standardised death rate (per 100,000 population). The same trend is clearly evident. People have been dying at a greater rate in Australia over the course of this year.

So what are the causes of these excess deaths? Here’s a chart of Non-COVID respiratory illness mortality, things like influenza, pneumonia, and bronchitis. It’s pretty much been bang on average this year apart from August where it seems to have dipped below average, so these illnesses don’t really account for any excess deaths.

Cancer mortality has been somewhat higher than the baseline average for every month of this year accounting for at least some excess deaths. The report doesn’t go into any detail as to why, but I guess it could have to do with delays in treatment during the pandemic, a lack of preventative care, or disruptions to screening services. Not to mention Australia’s ageing population.

Heart disease has seen a little bit of an increase over historical averages, but it’s certainly not huge.

Deaths due to diabetes have seen significant increases throughout the course of this year. According to Diabetes Australia, diabetes is the fastest growing chronic condition in Australia. Risk factors include age, obesity, and a lack of physical exercise, things that could well have worsened throughout the pandemic.

Cerebrovascular disease, stroke, has been pretty much hovering around average this year, although it’s experienced a bit of a drop-off in the latest reporting period in August.

Dementia has been one of the biggest contributors to excess deaths this year. It comes in many forms, the most common being Alzheimer’s disease, which is a degenerative brain disease caused by nerve cell death resulting in shrinkage of the brain. Physical activity and social engagement are protective against developing dementia, while obesity, smoking, high blood pressure, depression and diabetes are all linked to an increased risk. So with all the lockdowns in Aged Care facilities over the course of the pandemic where residents were unable to see their family members, unable to go out to social events and so on, and unable to get as much exercise as normal, it’s certainly not surprising that these rates have gone up significantly.

These are the only causes of death that the report mentions, but one thing that is clear, there has been a significant increase in non-COVID deaths over the year, especially with regards to cancer, diabetes, and dementia.

Thank you for watching this presentation. Hopefully, society learns from this pandemic and realises that not all preventative measures are good ones.

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