Thought of the Day - July 13 2021 - Stats Can: Canada's Death Toll Could Be Double Official Figure

"COVID-19 deaths in Canada may be two times higher than reported, study finds". Wow, quite the sobering thought.

A study by the Royal Society of Canada suggests Canada has vastly underestimated how many people have died from COVID-19. It claims at least two-thirds of deaths caused by COVID-19 outside of long-term care may have been missed.

The conclusion is based on a review of reports of excess deaths across Canada and the pattern of fatalities and cremation from deaths in homes, versus hospitals, in 2020. It also relied on antibody testing that revealed the broad scope of undetected COVID-19 infections. The researchers adjusted the data to account for things like increased deaths due to the drug toxicity crisis and the expected drop in deaths linked to the pandemic because of things like reduced traffic accident rates.

StatsCan found 18,511 more Canadians died than expected from the start of the pandemic in March 2020 to early March 2021. However the study found between February 1 and November 28, 2020 COVID-19 deaths of about 6,000 people aged 45 and older appeared to have gone undetected, unreported or unattributed to the virus.

The extent of "likely missed" fatalities varies by province but says the knowledge gap is particularly acute in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, where cause-of-death data is only complete into February 2020. It is up to the provinces to report deaths to Statistics Canada, but not all of them have been able to stay up-to-date during the pandemic. For example, the image in Manitoba remains fuzzy because the province is way behind on the count. In Manitoba death statistics are only complete for the first nine months of the pandemic, yet from March to December 2020, 429 more Manitobans died than Statistics Canada expected.

According to OurWorldInData, Canada is sitting at about 70th in the world in deaths per capita at about 7 per ten thousand, about the same as Honduras and Israel, but if this report is correct we could actually be more similar to Sweden, who are standing at about 14 deaths per ten thousand; you know the country that did little as far as government intervention.

In short, in the same way that Peru recently recast its COVID death count ( Thought of the Day - June 6 2021 - By the Numbers ), there now seems to be a good case for Canada to do the same.

Cheers

Cliff