Via The Globe and Mail: Canada’s COVID-19 death toll from first months of pandemic higher than thought, data show. Excerpt:
The loss of life in the pandemic’s first nine months was more widespread than official numbers indicated, with mortality spiking sharply even in provinces that reported relatively low death tolls from the virus, according to newly available national data.
A revised geography of the pandemic in Canada emerges from an analysis of the figures by Tara Moriarty, a professor of laboratory medicine and pathobiology at the University of Toronto.
Official COVID-19 deaths in the spring and summer of 2020 were mostly limited to Ontario and Quebec. However, the rate of “excess deaths” – those over and above what would have been expected given the trend in recent years – was much more pronounced in Western Canada than virus fatalities alone can account for.
The statistics suggest some provinces may have inadvertently undercounted COVID-19 deaths by a wide margin, Dr. Moriarty said. Provincial governments themselves have argued the disparity could be caused by hundreds of ailing people dying at home while avoiding hospitals for fear of the virus.
Whatever their exact cause, the number of excess deaths shows a country that suffered much more equally than previously believed. (The analysis found there was virtually no gap between COVID-19 deaths and excess deaths in Atlantic Canada and the North.)
Between March and November last year, British Columbia saw about six times as many “excess deaths” as reported COVID-19 fatalities, Dr. Moriarty found. Saskatchewan saw 10 times as many. The figures suggest hundreds if not thousands more people may have died in Western Canada as a result of the pandemic than official estimates recorded.
“I think we’ve had a much bigger epidemic than we know,” she said.
To gain a clearer picture of the virus’s real toll, Dr. Moriarty parsed data compiled by Statistics Canada dating from the beginning of the pandemic to mid-November, the most recent point for which fairly complete numbers are available for all provinces.
Dr. Moriarty also subtracted the growth in toxic drug deaths from her analysis, to make sure she wasn’t simply capturing the human cost of Canada’s parallel opioid-poisoning epidemic. The numbers that remained were stark and surprising.
Even controlling for overdoses in this way, B.C. still had 1,650 excess deaths in those nine months, compared with 290 official COVID-19 deaths. Among adults over 64 – those most vulnerable to COVID-19 – there were 1,099 excess deaths.
In Saskatchewan, the disparity was even more dramatic: 293 excess deaths against just 29 COVID-19 fatalities. Alberta (1049 vs. 401) and Ontario (4,037 vs. 3,372) also had considerably higher excess death tallies than their official pandemic death toll. All told, Dr. Moriarty’s calculations show more than 3,000 excess deaths, over and above those attributed to COVID-19, outside of the Quebec epicentre.
“We’re missing something,” she said.