Covid-19 link to 13% spike in death rate

COVID-19 has caused a 13% rise in the number of deaths over the past four months – but capturing the true impact of the virus remains a challenge, the health watchdog revealed yesterday.

Between March 11 and June 16, 1,709 people died of the disease.

Since 2010, the number of deaths has risen every year, with the peak in winter.

During the week of April 8 to 14, at the height of the pandemic, 941 deaths were recorded on RIP.IE.

Between March 25 and May 5, there were 4,827 fatalities recorded on the website. This exceeded the expected number of deaths – which was 3,627 – by 1,200.

During that six-week period, 1,332 Covid-19-related fatalities were reported through the HSE system.

This means the health system is accurately capturing the number of deaths due to Covid-19, despite previous concerns we were under-reporting.

Dr Conor Teljeur, chief scientist at HIQA, told the Irish Mirror: “Everything points to the fact we are not undercounting, we are capturing them all.

“This gives us reassurance that the official figures are not an undercount. They’re not missing deaths. “The reality is we have quite a few people who are at end of life or close to end of life who got infected with Covid-19 and died because of Covid-19, but it’s possible they would have died during this period because they were close to end of life.

“So they are being correctly counted as Covid-19 deaths but when you look at excess mortality you don’t see those deaths because they would have potentially died.

“So excess mortality doesn’t tell you the true burden of Covid-19.”