The CSO has published a study defining excess mortality as an increase in the total number of deaths.
Their own estimates say that the number of people aged 85+ are rapidly increasing (up 16% from 2017 - 2020).
But they leave that out of the calculation of expected mortality:
Instead, their method is to subtract the average of prior years from the current year.
Unfortunately, when you have a steadily increasing time series, the average of prior years is not a good estimator of the current year.
As I noted recently:
Applying the CSO's method to prior years, there are several other occasions when "excess deaths" calculated in this way ran into four figures - without making any adjustments for the changing size and age of the Irish population.
To avoid mixing winter seasons, you could instead look at the October-September cycle, to see the impact of the so-called "first wave" on 2019/2020.
Adjusting for population size only, you find that the mortality rate for 2019/2020 is normal - lower than 2017/2018, for example.
If you use the CSO's provisional registrations data and further adjust for age, you find Covid's first wave - Q2 2020 - was very safe by historical standards.
Indeed, how many people realise that Q1 2020 - with very few "Covid deaths" - saw more deaths registered than Q2 2020?
This is even true for those aged 75+.
Death registrations as a proportion of the 75+ population were higher in Q1 2020 than Q2 2020.
This implies that the cold Q1 weather was more dangerous for the elderly than the combination of Covid and healthcare deprivation suffered in Q2:
For those aged 55-64 and 65-74, there were small upticks in deaths registered in Q2 2020 vs. Q1 2020.
Did healthcare deprivation hit these age groups harder than it hit those aged 75+?
But the impact on those aged 55-64 was very slight - Q2 2019 was worse than Q2 2020 for them.
When the current cycle is over, we'll see the real impact of 2nd wave "Covid deaths", and healthcare deprivation, on overall mortality.
Until then, we'll have to keep looking for answers in primary sources - and doing our own analysis, rather than outsourcing it to government.
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