Comparison of Excess Deaths in Australia and Other OECD Countries

Daily Insight

In this video, we take a look at some OECD data showing us the number of excess deaths by week of occurrence in 2022. For the purposes of this presentation, I’ll just be looking at the data from Australia, Canada, Sweden, the UK, and the United States, although feel free to look up the data for other countries if you wish.

The website that we’ll be using is OECD.Stat, which is the official OECD statistics website. First, we’ll need to click on “Health”. Then click on “COVID-19 Health Indicators”. Then we need to click on “Mortality (by week)”. Then finally click on “Excess deaths by week, 2020-2022”. This will show us a table of data with a whole bunch of countries included, but as I said at the start, I’m only wanting to use those five countries that I mentioned previously. So you can simply click on “Customise”, then “Country”, and then select the countries that you wish to include.

I’m going to click on the export button, and export the data as an Excel spreadsheet, so that it’s easier to present and to add up numbers and so on.

The table shows you the data for each of the countries, Australia, Canada, Sweden, and so on, and the Week number for each week of 2022 so far. Not all countries have released all the data so far, for example, Australia only has up until Week 30, which is up until the end of July. For each country, there are two columns, Excess Deaths as a number, that is, how many extra people died in that week compared to historical averages, and the Percentage Change, again, as compared to historical averages.

One thing I wanted to know from this data was how many total extra deaths there have been so far this year, so I just found the sum of each of the columns using Excel. Australia, for example, has almost 19,000 extra deaths this year alone! And that’s only up until the end of July! Canada is similar at 21,000 excess deaths. UK 27,000. The US 349,000, remembering though, that the US has a much larger population at around 332 million which is around 12 or 13 times the population of Australia, but even so, that’s a lot of extra deaths! But the standout, I suppose, is Sweden with only 158 extra deaths in total, a fraction of the other countries, noting that Sweden has a population of around ten-and-a-half million people. So why would that be? Why would Sweden have so few excess deaths?

Here’s a comparison of the raw data between Sweden and Australia, noting that Australia has about two-and-a-half times the population. But even so, there’s a huge disparity in excess deaths between the two countries. The excess deaths in Sweden, shown in orange, are relatively stable, in that sometimes they’re positive, sometimes they’re negative, but overall, they’re hovering around the x-axis – the zero mark. Whereas Australia in blue has clearly stayed well above historical averages. Depending on the week, there’s been between 400 and 1000 extra deaths every week this year. I mean, that would be like a jumbo jet falling out of the sky every single week.

If we compare the percentage change of excess deaths between Sweden and Australia, which basically takes out the population difference, we can still see that Australia is well above Sweden in terms of excess deaths. They kind of follow the same pattern, but a lot less extra people are dying in Sweden. Let’s add Canada in yellow. It pretty follows the same percentage of extra deaths as Australia, except that by about Week 20, it drops off quite rapidly. Australia though, continues to have significant excess deaths. Let’s add the UK to the mix in green. At the start of the year, it was faring fairly well, but then numbers went a bit crazy in the middle, coming back to some sense of normalcy in the latest reporting period, but who knows how long that will last? And finally, the United States in brown. It seems to be following a similar trend to Australia, although started out with more excess deaths early on in the year, but then dipped below Australia, but seems to have risen in more recent months. Either way, percentage wise, it certainly has more excess deaths than Sweden.

Look, we’d have to follow this data over the long term to see how this all plays out, but as I said before, isn’t this worth investigating? Why is the government basically not talking about this? Does anybody know? I suppose it’s just not in their political interests. They have more to lose than to gain.

Anyway, that will do us for this video. In a future video, I would like to talk about causes of death with regards to these excess deaths and see how that’s been trending. Talk soon.

 

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