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According to a new analysis by the Central Statistical Office, there would have been between 900 and 1,200 more people alive in Ireland in October this year had the Covid-19 pandemic not occurred.
That’s your estimate of the so-called “excess deaths” that occurred here during the seven months from early March to late September.
It is substantially lower than the total number of Covid-19 related deaths reported in official figures released daily by the Health Department.
In an earlier analysis, using a different but related approach, HIQA statistics also found that the excess deaths in Ireland due to Covid-19 was less than the official death toll.
HIQA said, on that occasion, that a substantial part of the explanation was that in some cases Covid-19 had accelerated the time of death of some elderly and vulnerable people who may have ended up dying “with” Covid-19 instead of dying. “. of” Covid-19.
John Flanagan, the OSC statistician who pored over and ranked 34,000 death notices on RIP.ie for CSO’s new experimental analysis in today’s report, also made a similar reference.
However, he also wanted to point out that the explanation could be more complicated than that.
For example, people’s behavior changed enormously during the Covid-19 lockdown periods, which could have affected mortality trends.
There were far fewer people in the workplace while people worked from home. Could it have resulted in fewer workplace accidents?
There was less traffic on the roads. Did that mean fewer road deaths?
People committed to social distancing. Did that result in fewer deaths from other infectious diseases, including flu and other illnesses?
Contrary to that, fewer people showed up for treatment and screening for serious diseases like cancer, as many hospital services were suspended. Will that or will it result in more non-Covid-19 related deaths?
We still don’t know the answer to all these questions. It’s going to take some time to gather all the information and data, especially when up to three months are allowed for a death to be officially recorded in Ireland.
Regardless of each other, both the Central Statistical Office and HIQA resorted to the use of death notice entries on the RIP.ie website to address these issues, so that the public and policy makers could have a more timely indicator but precise of the toll charged by Covid-19.
The CSO conducted a very detailed study of the accuracy of the RIP.ie death notice entries and found that they were a very accurate proxy proxy for official death records.
It found that a death is generally reported on RIP.ie within 1.1 days of its occurrence, and that the correlation with official death statistics released a few months later is greater than 95%.
Using RIP.ie death notices with some degree of confidence, the latest OSC report on excess deaths noted that 2,547 deaths occurred in Ireland in April last year.
Due to COVID-19, the number of deaths in the month of April this year was much higher than 3,502. That’s almost 1,000 additional deaths.
In the following months, June and July, the opposite occurred, with 164 fewer deaths in June 2020 than in 2019, and 155 fewer deaths in July 2020 than the previous year.
Taking the first seven months of the pandemic together, CSO calculations found that the cumulative number of deaths that occurred was 876 more than during the same months in 2019.
When compared to the average number of deaths during the same months over the previous two years, the excess deaths amounted to 887.
When compared to the average for the previous three years, the total excess deaths is 1,192.
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The CSO said its new analysis “appears to indicate” that the Department of Health data on coronavirus-related deaths “comprehensively captures” the impact of Covid-19 on mortality in Ireland.
This is different from the situation in some other countries where Covid-19 deaths are classified differently.
As a result, the excess deaths are turning out to be higher than the official death toll from Covid-19 in these regions, and not lower.
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