Claims that COVID vaccines may have helped fuel a rise in excess deaths have appeared in several major news outlets. An expert examines the evidence.
Articles on Excess deaths
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Many people with long COVID experience persistent debilitating symptoms like fatigue and brain fog. But a few develop more life-threatening and lasting damage to their heart and brain.
An upgraded global response to future potential pandemic threats would give the best chance of eliminating new infectious diseases at source before they spread globally.
There were deaths from COVID and deaths with COVID – but other deaths are also likely linked to the virus’s impact on our health and our medical care.
More people died from the austerity in the five years before the pandemic than have died from COVID since.
Only a portion of excess deaths had COVID mentioned on the death certificate. But the pandemic could be affecting death rates indirectly.
How governments chose to respond to the coronavirus – and how well equipped their health services were before it arrived – made a big difference.
Between May 2020 and early September 2021, over a quarter of a million more people have died from natural causes than was predicted for that time period.
Record-keepers have a pretty good sense of how many people have died. But figuring out the cause of those deaths is a lot trickier – and that’s why reasonable modelers can disagree.
Most pandemic policies have benefited those already best off in US society and ignored people for whom neither mass shutdowns nor reopening offer relief.
This government has known more about the granular detail of the crisis than any government in any crisis before it.
Health statisticians keep careful tabs on how many people die every week. Based on what’s happened in past years, they know what to expect – but 2020 death counts are surging beyond predictions.
It’s hard to make international comparisons of the COVID death rates in individual countries, but a new approach is giving scientists better data to work with.
Health statisticians keep careful tabs on how many people die every week. Based on what’s happened in past years, they know what to expect – but 2020 death counts are surging beyond predictions.
Australian Bureau of Statistics figures suggest there have been more than 800 ‘excess deaths’ in Australia in January-March 2020, relative to the average, but only 103 confirmed COVID-19 deaths so far.
Top contributors
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Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Professor of Statistics, Virginia Tech
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Professor of Medicine, University of East Anglia
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Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Adelaide University
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Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
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Professor of Public Health Medicine, University of Newcastle
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Chair in Epidemiology, Deakin University
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Professor of Public Health, University of Otago
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Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, The Open University
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Vice Dean of Global Health, Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore
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Postdoctoral Scholar in Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco
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Postdoctoral Scholar in Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco
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Research Associate in Economics, Cardiff University
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Professor of Public Health, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University
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Professor of Demography, University of Cape Town
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Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, San Francisco