mortality canada
The seasonal wave seems to be over in most places so it is time to revisit the numbers and see how our understanding has changed from our preliminary perspective on this pandemic. Remember, we were told that millions would die, and that we had to do our part to flatten the curve so that the health facilities would not be overrun. It was also just supposed to be for two weeks.
The average age of Canadians who died of COVID-19 in 2020 is 83.8 years, according to Statistics Canada, yet the Average life expectancy is only 76.5 years.
Excess deaths in Canada
Deaths in Canada for Covid-19 are reported to be 8,947 for the 18th month period ending Aug 5, 2020. 90% of those deaths were people 70 and older. 82% of deaths occurred in Long Term Health Care facilities. In the province of Quebec it was 93%. Annual deaths in Canada are approximately 300,000 so Covid-19 deaths are just under 3% of that.
Leading causes of Death, Canada 2018 (for 12 month period)
| Rank | Cause of death | Total deaths |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cancer | 79,536 |
| 2 | Heart disease | 53,134 |
| 3 | Cerebrovascular diseases | 13,480 |
| 4 | Accidents | 13,290 |
| 5 | Chronic lower respiratory diseases | 12,998 |
| 6 | Flu and pneumonia | 8,511 |
| 7 | Diabetes | 6,794 |
| 8 | Alzheimer’s disease | 6,429 |
| 9 | Suicide | 3,811 |
| 10 | Kidney diseases | 3,615 |
Lets look at all-cause mortality, as provided by StatsCan.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/200724/dq200724a-eng.htm
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020017-eng.htm
The following graphs, taken from their website, show the number of deaths in each week for the past five years. For comparison, each year is superimposed over top of each other, and each year is represented by a different colour. The current year is represented by a dashed line.
Even though these graphs were just released, I have no explanation for why the covid period ends in May. I am going to assume it is just due to a processing delay of the raw information. This is my biggest problem with StatsCan - they are not transparent about what they are doing.
Looking first at children and young adults, we are unable to see anything unusual in this year compared to prior years. It is actually difficult to see the Covid period because it is right in the middle of previous years. There does not appear to be any excess deaths caused by COVID19 for this age group. Why are we involving children in this pandemic scare when they are no more affected by it than they would be by the seasonal flu.
Children and young adults
Adults
Deaths for adults is also lower than normal, which is actually quite surprising.
Senior Citizens
Only with the senior citizens do we see a noticeable but temporary increase in the number of deaths, followed by a decrease below normal level. So how will this average out over the year?
Elderly
Finally, looking at the elderly, we clearly see a bump in the number of deaths for a few weeks. Even then, April deaths are below January deaths, and as we have already seen, the rise above normal is followed by a fall below normal which means the year will average out as, well, average.
Just a reminder. The typical government response to the alarming rise in covid deaths at the beginning of the first wave was to draw down the number of patients in the hospitals by sending them back to the LTC's. A number of people have noted that this caused problems for the other residents of the LTC and resulted in a wave of additional deaths.
2024 UPDATE
Stats Canada now have an update to the graphics that were released back in 2020 that worth looking at.
Excess mortality in Ontario (2020)
Statscan has also provided graphs for all-cause mortality for a number of the provinces. Here is what Ontario looks like.
Ontario deaths in 2020-compared to previous 5 years
You can find it here. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/200724/g-a004-eng.htm
Sure there was a bump that began two weeks after the lockdowns (Mar 12) but it was short lived and compares similarly with the previous 5 years. It has all ages combined so once again, it is mostly those over 70. Also, from May onward, deaths are below normal compared to the previous 5 years.
US deaths as reported by the CDC
Majority of deaths occurred in Long Term Care Facilities
This is such an important point because the media and politicians try to portray the risk being equal across the population. But this is simply not the case. In Quebec, deaths in Long Term Care facilities accounted for 93% of deaths which is pretty much all of them. The remaining 7% were not in LTC but also had comorbidities, which means they were already dying of something else. Remember, 100% had at least one comorbidity. 99% had two or more. What most people do not realize, or may have forgotten is that people that go into Long Term Care Facilities are already sick and frail. The average lifespan of a resident in an LTC is 18 months. Which means the attrition rate is 30% of the population of the LTC, each year. In addition, deaths are very seasonal with half of them occuring during the flu season, which amounts to 15% of the population of the LTC. This is exactly the same death rate that occurred during the initial Covid outbreak. Most LTC's experienced about 15% of deaths. And remember, this is an average across all LTC's. Some had higher percentages and some had lower. 15% is the average. This is why we are saying Covid mortality is pretty much in keeping with influenza mortality and why StatsCan are not reporting any excess deaths.
How Canada compares to other countries
In terms of deaths per million, Canada ranks around 184 as shown by worldometers.info with 237 deaths per million. That means 183 countries did better than us. This puts us in the middle of it's peer of first world countries. (100-1000 deaths/million) which I have covered in another blog post. In comparison, USA ranks 205 with 479 deaths per million, more than twice Canada’s rate. Sweden, which I will get back to shortly, came in at 202, pretty close to Canada. A question that really needs to get answered is why are we in a cluster that is 10x - 100x more severe than countries that are in the single-digit cluster:
Clustering
| cluster (deaths/million) | cohorts (sample) |
|---|---|
| 100-1000 | Belgium, Peru, Spain, Italy |
| 10-100 | Canada, US, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands |
| 1-10 | China, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan |
We still have no explanation offered why the proportion of deaths varies so widely from one country to the next. Is it due to their methods of counting? Are they healthier? Do they have less old people?
The death rate for the Seasonal flu around .1% of those infected, which is called the IFR. With Covid19, we are seeing a 3.6% case fatality rate, which is referred to as CFR. However, cases refer only to those that have been tested, not to the overall population, which is something that is used in the seasonal flu calculations, so you can not compare those two numbers without making an adjustment to determine how many people were actually infected. You have to compare Covid IFR to Seasonal flue IFR if you want to do a comparison.
Canada has tested just over 10% of the population with 4.5 million tests out of a population of 37 million which resulted in 120 thousand cases. Could this be extrapolated to the whole population to derive an estimated 1 million cases? That would put the case death rate at .36 if it is true. Difficult to estimate the total number of those infected, but we do know most are asymptomatic so it is probably a high number.
The Covid19 pandemic can also be compared to the last three flu pandemics during the last century. But remember, the population has doubled a few times during this period so past events would have to be scaled up to as much as 3x to compare to today’s population, and these numbers have not been population adjusted. For example the 25-50 million deaths a hundred years ago would be equivalent to 75-150 million proportional deaths given hat the size of our current population has grown 3 times during that period.
- 1918 flu pandemic – 25-50 million deaths
- 1957 flu pandemic – 1-2 million deaths with death rate around .67
- 1968 flu pandemic – 1-4 million deaths. Immunity from 1957 carried forward
- 2020 Covid19 pandemic – 0.75 million deaths.
Note. When I first wrote this, Aug 2020 the first wave of deaths was over. Since then the mainstream media continues to report that as many as 50 million have died from covid. Is that actually true?
Children
Children are doing better in 2020 than previous years.
Here is an interesting graph from EUROMOMO for children all across Europe. 2020 is shown to be lower than the previous 5 years for this age group.
EUROMOMO: Deaths for children are lower than previous years in all of Europe
All Cause Mortality Canada Historic
All Cause Mortality (UPDATED Dec 2022)
USA experience (CDC)
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-by-Sex-Age-and-S/9bhg-hcku
April, 2022 edition of The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, entitled, “The Role of Children and Young People in the Transmission of SARS-CoV-2,” concluded: “there is NO convincing evidence to date, 2 years into the pandemic, that children are key drivers of the pandemic.
Childhood covid-19 disease burden, however, is not exclusively defined by mortality; it includes morbidity. To that end, I have begun analyzing hospitalization datasets I purchased from RIDOH for all hospitalizations in our state, organized by what are called ICD diagnostic codes, for calendar years 2019, 2020, and 2021, comparing influenza and covid-19 hospitalizations among children, up to age 18. My initial analyses are summarized in the tables provided, below.
What is the evidence that masking of children in schools can reduce their risk for contracting and transmitting covid-19 regardless of their very low risk for clinically significant disease?
Notes and References
These are new items of interest for this topic that I have recently discovered but not yet explored.
death < 14 days
contrary argument on vaers
C19 “vaccine” - the cause of causes
https://coquindechien.substack.com/p/c19-vaccine-the-cause-of-causes?s=r
New-onset autoimmune phenomena post-COVID-19 vaccination
US covid test positivity rates by vaccination status
yet another set of evidence that vaccines are not working to stop covid spread and that boosters wind up making you more likely to contract covid in the long run
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/us-covid-test-positivity-rates-by?s=r
Myocarditis, Pulmonary Hemorrhage, and Extensive Myositis with Rhabdomyolysis 12 Days After First Dose of Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine: A Case Report
Case Report: Anti-NF186+ CIDP After Receiving the Inactivated Vaccine for Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP)
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2022.838222/full
A Case Series of Ketoacidosis After Coronavirus Disease 2019 Vaccination in Patients With Type 1 Diabetes
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2022.840580/full
A Public Health Emergency in Canada: The Rate of Change in Excess Millennial Deaths Can’t Be Explained by a Sudden Rush of Suicides, Overdoses, Cancers
https://lionessofjudah.substack.com/p/a-public-health-emergency-in-canada?s=r