Excess Deaths Worldwide First Half 2023

Excess deaths have been a problem around the world in the first half of 2023, but not in every country. Some countries have had very few, if any, excess deaths (I think you can guess which country, I’ll show you towards the end of this video). I’m not here to explain why there are excess deaths. For example, some news outlets are claiming an increase in hurricane intensity is responsible, at least, in some parts of the world.

The data we’ll be using is from the OECD Stat website. We’ll be clicking on Health → COVID-19 Health Indicators → Mortality by week (scroll down a little) → Excess deaths by week, 2020-2023. I’ll just be exporting this to Excel so that I can make some graphs. This is the Excel file. We’ll just be looking at the second column for each country, Excess deaths (% change from average).

We’ll start with Australia. As you can seen, there are only 12 weeks of data for Australia. That’s just what the OECD have been given from the Australian Government. We can see that Australia’s excess deaths are still stubbornly high falling between 10 and 20% on average over the first three months of 2023. There have only been 8 reported deaths from cyclones during that period, all of which occurred during Cyclone Ilsa after two boats capsized off the coast of Western Australia. There have been a total of 5122 excess deaths during that period, so 8 deaths represents only about 0.16 of 1% of those deaths, certainly not a contributing factor.

Canada. The Canadian Government have been a bit slack and have only provided 3 weeks of data shown in red. I’m not sure why. Yes, the percentage of excess deaths are significantly less than Australia, but as there are only 3 weeks of data, we can barely make any sort of comment.

The United States shown in light blue have a lot more data, and lie somewhere between Australia and Canada in terms of excess deaths, averaging between 5 and 10% over the first half of the year. Australia is still on top.

New Zealand shown in green also has provided a lot of data and seems to have more excess deaths on average than Australia. If we put in the mean lines (the average excess death percentages), we can see that New Zealand is certainly ahead. Noting there were 11 cyclone deaths in New Zealand during that period out of a total of 2128 excess deaths representing about half a percent, that is, if you can even count them as excess deaths. Either way, it’s a very low number and not really a contributing factor.

Germany shown in black is an interesting one. At the start of the year, they had significant excess deaths that plummeted, but has since levelled of to between 8 and 10%.

The United Kingdom, shown in orange, follows a rather erratic pattern. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s due to the way they report these deaths over there. Of late, they seem to fall anywhere between 0 and 15% or so.

Second to last, Israel, has been fairly consistent hovering around the 10% mark in recent weeks. But the point is, there are still significant excess deaths. 10% is not nothing.

And the last country, the one that we’ve all been waiting for, Sweden. In the first couple of weeks of the year, they certainly had some excess deaths, but very quickly plummeted to below zero. They were experiencing less deaths than average. But in recent weeks, they’ve been hovering around zero, which is good, meaning they’re experiencing the average number of deaths per week. In terms of excess deaths, they are by far the best performing country in the OECD. I guess it’s because they’ve had very few hurricanes.

OECD.STAT DATA
https://stats.oecd.org/

STUDY FINDS GREATER EXCESS MORTALITY AFTER HURRICANES IN THE U.S.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-08-greater-excess-mortality-hurricanes-socially.html

2022–23 AUSTRALIAN REGION CYCLONE SEASON
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%9323_Australian_region_cyclone_season

MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn