There can be lots of arguments about COVID deaths. Did a person die of COVID or with COVID? Could some people have died of COVID without being identified as such, especially early in the pandemic?
Excess mortality is much more straightforward: either you're dead or you're not. A successful public health system should keep all-cause mortality as low as possible.
Let's look at how BC did during the pandemic.
The following two graphs come from the BC Centre for Disease Control. The first looks at all-cause mortality in BC over the past 13 years:
What's noticeable about this graph?
First, the all-cause death rate in 2009 was higher than in any other year, including 2020 and 2021. If you remember, 2009 was the year of the H1N1 flu epidemic - the worst flu epidemic in years. We just let it roar through - no lockdowns, no social distancing, no masks. It raised the overall death rate by roughly 3 percent above normal. Mostly it killed the old and the frail.
The year 2020 saw an overall death rate in BC that was pretty much spot-on normal. The same number of people died as die in an average year. There were no vaccines in 2020, so it represents how we coped with COVID without vaccines.
In 2021 - the year vaccines were supposed to save us - the death rate was actually higher than in 2020, and higher than any year since 2009. Yes, 2021 also had the heat dome - which killed several hundred seniors across the province, and the Delta variant spread much more rapidly than previous variants of COVID. With those caveats, I think it is fair to say that the leaky and temporary mRNA vaccines provided a pretty underwhelming level of pandemic control. The good news was that deaths in BC in 2021 were only about two percent higher than an average year.
You could say BC did an utterly fantastic job preventing excess deaths in 2020 and 2021. You might also wonder out loud whether we over-reacted to a disease that was mostly killing the old and the frail - the same people who would have died of the flu in a normal year.
What would have happened if we had focused our attention on protecting the old and the frail, and let everyone else live normally? I suspect 2020 would have then had a death rate much like 2009. Yes, more (mostly) old people would have died if we had chosen that path. That would have been unfortunate.
But what we did in BC with the various lock-downs, the social distancing and the school closures also had some very unfortunate side-effects: hundreds of failed businesses, setbacks to children's learning and social development, massive government debt, limited and constrained social lives for all of us. Was it worth it?
Now let's look at what killed people during the pandemic:
Cancer, illicit drugs, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, and diabetes each killed more people than COVID did. (Illicit drugs in particular was a far deadlier 'pandemic' than COVID.)
Because the average age of death from COVID was 82, the total years of life lost to COVID was relatively small compared to other causes of death.
The number of years of life lost from illicit drug deaths was four times that of COVID, but we didn't turn the world upside down trying to prevent those deaths, did we?
Again when we look at COVID is relation to other causes of death, I can't help but feel that our COVID policies were more a function of panic than any rational appraisal of the risk-benefit trade-offs.
When the COVID pandemic finally winds down, I believe we need to do a very rigorous review of how the COVID pandemic was managed, so that, hopefully, we can do a better job the next time round.
PS: My wife had a hip replacement last week, so I’ve been otherwise occupied. (Caty is recovering quickly!)
Excess Deaths in BC
These are very interesting details - it is about time that this level of comparisons was looked it - so important to any level of after-action reviews
very nicely stated.