Every death was once a living person who deserves respect. Real deaths should not be homogenised to cover up government negligence.
In the same way the BOM homogenises weather records the ABS models expected deaths and then calls the differences between the modelled figures and the actual figures excess deaths.
This is a perfect distraction in order to stop looking at the increase in actual deaths.
The ABS cannot explain why they modelled deaths to rise to 169,000 in 2021, up from 162,000 in 2020.
Population growth was static, there were more lockdowns in 2021 than 2020 and there was no flu and no COVID in the community.
So why the jump, given lockdowns resulted in less deaths in 2020 than 2019.
The ABS can’t explain where they got their assumptions from, but by increasing the modelled figure they can claim that excess deaths was only 3,000 and not 10,000 which was statistically insignificant being one standard deviation from the mean not three which is statistically significant.
It doesn’t matter which way you cut it, the bureaucrats will come up with a way to lie every time.
Community Affairs References Committee
13/06/2024
Excess Mortality
Senator RENNICK: In your opening submission, you said that ABS statistics show that COVID-19 was the main cause of excess deaths in 2021. You’ve modelled excess deaths to be at 169,000, which was up from 7,000 in 2020 and from 5,000 in 2019, on an actual basis, which was in excess of population growth. But I’m interested in all-cause mortality. Anyone who looks at drug trials looks at all-cause mortality because, originally, when they started drug trials back in the middle of the 20th century, they’d say, ‘Oh, this drug alleviates this particular symptom,’ but if the overall all-cause mortality increased, that was an issue. What we saw in 2021 was a jump of almost 10,000 deaths in the last eight months, and yet there were only 1,300 deaths from COVID in 2021. So, while you may be correct with your model figure that COVID was the reason for the major increase in excess deaths, do you accept that it wasn’t the major reason for the increase in actual all-cause mortality in 2021, given that there was a jump of almost 10,000 deaths?
Ms Moran: We see a few reasons for deaths increasing in 2021. Some of that, we believe, is due to mortality displacement. Because deaths were so low in the winter period in 2020 and, really, so low to the end of the year, we feel that there was some catch-up and—
Senator RENNICK: But deaths dropped by 2,000 in 2020 from deaths in 2019, so it’s not 10,000 but 2,000.
Ms Moran: Yes, that’s right. Also, with the population increase, we still do expect some people to die. Even though there looks to be a flat or negative increase, the reason for the population dropping so much in 2021 was that we had such a low migration rate, and that affects the younger age groups, where we really didn’t expect people to die. When we look at ages 65 and over and really get to those 85 and over groups, those population growths are still going up by six per cent and even more, because deaths were so low in 2020. There is still some concept of that ageing population there, and we think that also attributed to some deaths from COVID. Also, we would expect there to be some issues with accessing health care, although our data can’t measure that.
Senator RENNICK: That’s a fair point. I accept that didn’t show in the figures until May 2021.
