NZ net excess mortality
Nice story by Farah Hancock at Newsroom, on NZ mortality data.
In places with less successful control of COViD-19, there has been a spike in deaths confirmed as due to coronavirus, and also a spike in other deaths. In New Zealand, there hasn’t been — there isn’t any clear excess over the average for the time of year. There undoubtedly have been deaths due to coronavirus, but there have also been deaths prevented by the lockdown (on the roads, for example), and there may well have been deaths caused by the lockdown (eg, people not getting heart attacks treated promptly), but the overall trends are spectacularly unlike those in New York City, which has not quite twice the population of New Zealand and over 20,000 net excess deaths.
There’s still plenty of time for NZ to catch up to outbreaks in other parts of the world. Let’s not do that.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Accidents are usually age related so it would be interesting to look at excess deaths by age group.
If people do go to the hospital for emergency care then it’s likely to be better care than usual because the hospitals are running below capacity. And I suspect it might last for several months as the expected winter peak of flu cases might be much lower then expected – more people are getting vaccinated then usual and social distancing helps stop flu spread as well.
4 years ago
Since we’re not doing contact tracing and mandatory isolation for flu, there’s a good chance it will bounce back as soon as the restrictions are relaxed — though maybe with fewer deaths, if the vaccinations were in the right people.
4 years ago
Why oh why do we have to compare NZ to New York??
Why not compare us to say Hong Kong?
Or Taiwan?
Or Japan?
or
or
or.
Maybe even Belarus!!!!
Who just carried on life as usual. Albeit with much higher testing rates than NZ in the early stages..
4 years ago
If you want “just carried on life as usual”, that’s not Hong Kong or Taiwan or Japan.
The thing Taiwan, Japan, Belarus, and Hong Kong actually do have in common is that they haven’t released all-cause mortality data, so the comparison you want me to do isn’t possible.
4 years ago
There has been a website from the UCL London Networks and Research Group that has been using some interesting comparison graphs for different countries infection and deaths.
One of their graphs which include NZ is described as :
“The graph shows daily increase in confirmed cases normalized so the peaks of different countries are all the same height, plotted on a linear scale against time. A Holt-Winters moving average filter with constants α=0.5 and β=0.5 has been applied to smooth the curves as differences are very noisy. This is a moderate amount of smoothing and extracts trends fairly well without smoothing large peaks.”
They compare US states in interesting ways as well
http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/
4 years ago