Is B.C.’s COVID-19 death rate really as low as official numbers show?

New report argues there were more than 1,700 unexplained deaths in the province in the 1st wave. By: Justin McElroy ·CBC News Ask the B.C. government if they’ve done a good job handling the pandemic, and you’ll often hear a very specific answer. “The data is overwhelmingly supportive,” said Premier John Horgan last week. “The next closest of the jurisdictions of our size, of five million people in North America, the next closest to the low mortality rate is Ontario, and their mortality rate is twice what ours is.” Horgan, Health Minister Adrian Dix and government news releases have all mentioned B.C.’s official death count compared to other provinces, states and countries in western Europe with more than five million people. That very specific answer is based on a very specific chart — one produced by CBC News since the beginning of the pandemic, measuring official death counts in highly populated jurisdictions that were hit by the first wave at approximately the same time. It’s a rudimentary metric, and all countries have different ways of gathering data, but it shows a large gap between B.C. and dozens of other comparable places.

But what if those numbers didn’t paint the full picture?

Excess deaths

A report published last week by the Royal Society of Canada compared the number of official COVID-19 deaths in each province between Feb. 1 and Nov. 28, 2020, with excess deaths — essentially the difference between the total number of deaths and the number that was expected based on past years. .........