The COVID-19 pandemic which began in 2020 was a crisis. The virus was new to us;
The COVID-19 pandemic which began in 2020 was a crisis. The virus was new to us; we did not know exactly how it spread, how easily it spread, or how sick it could make us. This crisis caused deaths directly and indirectly. There were deaths from COVID infections, and there were deaths from other conditions in people weakened by COVID-19. There were deaths because of delays in medical treatment or fear of going to hospital. There were deaths from substance abuse and suicide related to the isolation of lockdowns, economic hardship, and uncertainty caused by the pandemic. There have been and will be deaths due to the long-term effects of having been infected.
Crisis deaths are deaths which are caused by exceptional situations -epidemics or pandemics, natural disasters, war, and severe economic downturns. By contrast, chronic deaths are deaths we expect due to the prevailing standard of living – the prevailing level of income, nutrition, medical care, sanitation, and safety – and due to the endemic diseases that exist in the population.
Usually, the presence of a crisis and the resulting crisis deaths means that the population will have more deaths than it would have otherwise. There will be excess deaths, that is to say, more deaths than what would have been expected under normal conditions. However, crises could conceivably result in fewer people dying than usual. COVID-19, which typically did result in excess deaths, nonetheless reduced the number of chronic deaths from ordinary forms of influenza as people washed their hands more frequently, wore masks, and socially distanced themselves. As people quarantined, air quality improved, and the number of workplace and traffic accidents fell.
Figure 8-0 shows us that, in the first 17 months of the pandemic, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island experienced fewer deaths than usual: excess deaths were negative. In contrast, British Columbia had more than 150 excess deaths per 100,000 people at midyear, or 1.5 per 1000.
To calculate whether a nation experienced excess deaths due to a disaster or pandemic, we need to know the number of deaths that would have occurred without the disaster. How do we do that?
Nowadays we use statistical regression analysis to predict the number of deaths that will occur in any year. Regression analysis sifts through mounds and mounds of data to tease out the relationship between the the number of deaths in a particular age/sex group and a number of factors, factors like the size of the age/sex group, the number of deaths in that age/sex group in the previous year, GDP, average daily temperature, average daily sugar consumption, etc. Then, to find what deaths for each age/sex group would have been in 2020 without the COVID-19 pandemic, the researcher makes an inference based on what the 2020 values of all the relevant factors would have been without the pandemic.
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