How many people dying in pandemic?

Canadians may soon find out true toll of virus

The federal statistics agency will try to put a number on how many “extra” people are dying in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Statistics Canada spokesman Peter Frayne said the agency plans to release an analysis later this month on “excess deaths” — a measure of the number of deaths beyond what’s expected in the country even as COVID-19 is taking thousands of lives.

Epidemiologists say that examining the total number of deaths from any cause — and comparing that with historic averages — can offer a more complete picture of the pandemic’s effect since it can capture those people who have died from COVID-19 without being diagnosed, for instance, or those who have died while awaiting surgery.

Statistics Canada, Frayne said, will compare death rates in the first three months of 2020 with those in the first three months of 2019.

The release, planned for mid-May, is part of a larger effort to publish more timely information on deaths, Frayne said, in conjunction with provincial and territorial vital statistics offices.

Canadian epidemiologists welcomed news of the data release, which they say will provide a better understanding of COVID-19’s human toll. Officially, the disease has claimed 4,567 lives in Canada.

University of Toronto epidemiologist David Fisman said excess-death data is critical information. “This is the ultimate metric of the impact of COVID-19,” he said, “and whether we make it better with these very costly measures we’ve taken.”

University of Ottawa professor Raywat Deonandan, an epidemiologist specializing in global health, said that right now Canadians only know about those people who have died from the disease after being diagnosed with it. “But there may be people in the community — in fact there likely are — who are not being captured by this process,” he said.

It includes people who have died from what family members have attributed to flu or stroke, but could be linked to COVID-19. “One of the cleanest ways of accounting for those ‘missed’ deaths,” he added, “is to compare the number of deaths now to the same time period in previous years.”

Deonandan said information about excess deaths is also important in assessing the accuracy of pandemic models: “We can get a sense as to how wrong or how right our existing models were — and maybe improve them down the road.”

An analysis of excess deaths in Canada can help answer a number of questions: Are a significant number of people dying at home from COVID-19 related issues without being diagnosed? What has been the effect of the dramatic drop in the number of people seeking help at emergency departments? Is the mortality rate for other diseases on the rise? Have suicide rates increased?

In many provinces, including Ontario and Quebec, there is only anecdotal evidence about the broader death toll. The Ottawa Citizen, for instance, has published 13 per cent more obituaries in April (863) than in March (761). In Montreal, a city hard hit by COVID-19, the Gazette has witnessed a 45 per cent increase in the number of obits between March (606) and April (876).

The Gazette also saw a 38 per cent jump in April’s obituaries compared with 2019. The Citizen experienced a 9.5 per cent decrease year over year in that month.

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