Pretend the COVID-19 pandemic never happened.
People still would have died across Canada, and the number of deaths would have been somewhat predictable based on data from previous years.
Dr. Kimberlyn McGrail
Dr. Kimberlyn McGrail, a professor in UBC's school of population of public health, examined all "excess deaths" across Canadian provinces during the first 19 months of the pandemic, and how many of those were attributed specifically to COVID-19.
Excess deaths are deaths above and beyond what would have been expected under normal circumstances.
UBC News spoke with her about the findings, published today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Why look at "excess deaths" rather than just COVID-19 deaths when trying to understand the pandemic?
The pandemic had a direct effect on deaths, in that people got the virus and unfortunately some died from it, but the pandemic also had other effects. People delayed care, or had surgeries, diagnostics and appointments cancelled, which can lead to poorer outcomes. We also had other public health events going on-particularly in B.C. with the ongoing tainted drug supply and the heat dome in the summer of 2021. Those things were potentially affected by the pandemic. So overall mortality is a better indication of what's actually happening at the population level.
How do we know how many deaths were expected?
I used data provided by Statistics Canada. They look at trends in the population's size and age in the five years preceding the pandemic to model what would have been expected in 2020-21, absent the pandemic.
What did you learn about excess deaths across Canada during the pandemic?
Excess mortality is just an estimate, but the experience across the provinces, according to what Statistics Canada is telling us, is very different. We saw very little to no excess death in the Atlantic provinces, and quite high excess deaths in western provinces.
