An Update on Excess Mortality in Ontario
A year ago, in my first post for this substack, I charted Ontario overall all-cause mortality data across four age brackets, and used this to estimate excess all-cause mortality. I then subtracted Covid deaths (as given by Public Health Ontario) to arrive at estimated non-Covid excess mortality. The shocking result was that non-Covid excess mortality was about the same (~7000) as Covid excess mortality in the two-year period between March of 2020 and March of 2022. I have now updated the graphs to include the year between (roughly) March of 2022 and March of 2023 (see the earlier post for my methodology). The results are once again quite damning for the government's 'War on Covid', which turned out to be a war on many other things, including, for many, life and health.
Here are the updated graphs, followed by a few comments:
(keep in mind that each dot represents the 52-week period that follows it)
The estimated excess non-Covid mortality figures for the period from March of 2022 to March of 2023 are as follows (with the figures for the two previous years, charted in the earlier post, in brackets):
0-44: 800 (vs 2000)
45-64: 870 (vs 1360)
65-84: 4930 (vs 3700)
85+: 700 (very close to trendline so hard to compare)
total: ~7300
What this means is that, in Ontario, there was as much non-Covid excess mortality in year three of the Covid response as there was in the first two combined (I suspect that other provinces have a similar pattern). The two lowest age brackets continued to have significant excess mortality but were trending down after a peak in 2021-22. In contrast, and rather alarmingly, for those aged 65-84 non-Covid excess mortality continued to rise. This category represents the lion’s share of the more vulnerable people that we were told would be protected by Covid-response policies, and yet they have been dying at progressively higher levels since March 2020. And once again, excess mortality among the 85+ is near normal, which implies that many of the ‘Covid’ deaths in that cohort would have happened anyway.
I will be the first to acknowledge that my calculations here are only rough estimates. Still, I would argue that the data that they’re based on are solid and that a ‘big picture’ outline of the mortality impact of Covid-response policies (taken together) can be grasped with a fair degree of accuracy. Needless to say, the picture does not look good for those who wish to claim that the War on Covid has been some kind of success. In Ontario alone, something like 14000 people lost their lives in the first three years of Covid-response policies not because of Covid itself but as collateral damage from the measures introduced to deal with it. Over the same period (i.e. up to the end of February of 2023), just over 16000 ‘Covid deaths’ occurred in Ontario. As we’ve seen, a significant fraction of these are in the most elderly and would have occurred anyway and been given a different label. Nor does the loose way in which ‘Covid death’ has been attributed across all ages inspire confidence. In other words, official Covid mortality figures are almost certainly inflated, and not just due to the lack of any major increase in excess mortality among the very old. We may conclude, therefore, that the cure has proven to be worse than the disease. Some may wish to say that the cure was necessary regardless because the death toll would have been much worse without mitigation. This assumes that mitigation had an appreciable effect (a large body of research argues that it did not). But it also completely sidesteps the ethical issue here: how on earth can anyone justify sacrificing lives that, for the most part, were not at risk from a pathogen in order to attempt (without any real success) to protect those who were?
What I’ve presented here is just a tiny fraction of a much larger body of data on excess mortality across many countries. John Campbell has been following this carefully and gives an update here. That this massive tread of increased mortality has no connection with Covid policies (even accounting for the natural impact of the virus itself) is hard to believe. At the very least the connection is plausible and should be investigated thoroughly. The implications are wide-ranging. But then that’s probably why these extra deaths are being ignored, both by the politicians and public health gurus who are directly responsible, and by the public, who understandably just want to get on with their lives, and have largely done so.