Fred Too
Several days ago I noticed that Statistics NZ released its September quarterly births and deaths figures on 17 November.
Deaths in the year to September 2022 had rocketed to 38,052, up 10 per cent from 34,578 in 2021. Deaths had already risen by six per cent in 2021, from 32,670 in 2020, although they were only a little higher than 2019’s 34,143.
A six per cent increase in deaths one year followed by a 10 per cent the next year is unprecedented. Yet I couldn’t recall this story making the news.
However, an internet search did find a Herald story where a Statistics NZ analyst explained that New Zealand has an ageing population.
… so we’re having reasonable increases in the number of people reaching those older ages where people are more likely to die.
However, it has been a bigger increase than just the impact of the ageing population.
The impact of Covid and other winter illnesses that have gone around have had an impact on the number of deaths and caused that jump.
Let’s have a closer look at these rising deaths in the last few years. I have used a non-zero scale to make the fluctuations more obvious.
You can see that until 2019, deaths were following a rising sawtooth pattern. The fluctuations were likely caused by a more severe winter flu striking every second year.
So if things had continued as per pre-Covid we might have had a less severe sawtooth dip in 2020 at around 500 more deaths than the 32,670 we experienced. This suggests the 2020 lockdown delayed some deaths but did not save thousands of lives as Michael Baker claims.
The number of deaths in 2021, at 34,578, fits back into the pre-Covid pattern and would normally have been the tip of another sawtooth.
However, instead of deaths dipping back a little in 2022, as we might have expected pre-Covid, they surged by nearly 3,500 to 38,052.
The Herald then gets Baker’s take on this surge.
Epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker said with Omicron circulating we had added an important new cause of death that had leapfrogged to fourth place behind heart disease, strokes and common cancers. He warned that it would likely remain a major killer for the foreseeable future.
While this year’s Covid death rate was around 10 times greater than the road toll, he said had the infection not arrived to a highly-vaccinated population the mortality rate would have been easily 10-fold higher.
So is Baker telling us that without the vaccine we would have had at least 35,000 deaths from Omicron in 2022 and double our normal annual death toll? That is a ridiculously high figure and it certainly doesn’t fit with any of the statistics on NZ deaths by vaccination status that have been explained in other articles in the BFD. Seems to me Baker is telling outright lies? He should have been pulled up for making such an outrageous comment!
