The Australian Bureau of Statistics last week released a new report on Covid mortality in Australia. The data is important – it exposes the inequality in how the pandemic is affecting Australians, with deaths higher among people from lower socioeconomic areas, and shockingly high death rates for people born outside Australia.
Experts told Guardian Australia a key reason for this is Australia’s reliance on migrants to undertake essential, insecure work and a failure of government to engage migrant communities early in pandemic planning.
These are issues rarely heard about from politicians and some media outlets during the pandemic, despite the trends being clear since at least August 2020.
However, rightwing radio hosts and columnists saw something different in the figures – support for an ongoing narrative that lockdowns and other interventions represented an “overreaction” or were the result of a “scare campaign”.
Paul Murray, on SkyNews Australia:
Of the 2,639 deaths, 96.7% of those already had serious, life-threatening underlying health conditions … So, how many people have actually died, not with, but exclusively from Covid in Australia in the past couple of years? It is 83. Now every one of those is absolutely a tragedy, as is the two and a bit thousand before that.
Murray went on to use this figure to question government responses:
Get rid of the codes, pull down the borders, take care of the people that are most at risk.
Ben Fordham, on 2GB and then repeated on news.com.au:
We know Covid-19 is serious, but it doesn’t warrant the fear campaign we’ve been seeing. Today we have further proof. This isn’t opinion, it is certified data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Then later in the broadcast Fordham said:
Again, let me be clear because some people take these stats the wrong way. We’re not playing down the situation, we’re not ignoring the grief of families. But these records expose the overblown scare campaign that we’ve witnessed.
In 92% of our Covid-related deaths to 31 January each patient had roughly three other underlying health conditions. In other words it wasn’t just Covid that claimed their lives.
And finally, he summed up:
If you’re overweight or smoking, you’re putting yourself in danger, and you’re more likely to be in the 1% of Australians who have died with coronavirus. Yes, 1%. If you need any further evidence that it’s time to get on with our lives, you’ve just heard it.
Rita Panahi, writing in the Herald Sun (the online version is different to the original):
The Australian Bureau of Statistics put out some crucial data this week that should shame every alarmist bureaucrat, politician and media blowhard who championed lockdowns, school closures and mandates.
Of the 2,639 deaths from or with Covid-19 in Australia, 2,556 had serious pre-existing conditions, on average three pre-existing conditions.
That means more than 91% of Covid-19 deaths in Australia, up until 31 January 2022, had underlying health issues, with cancer, dementia and chronic cardiac conditions among the most common pre-existing conditions.
And then later in the article, after comparing the number of Covid deaths to the annual number of deaths:
It’s hard not to conclude we needlessly crippled our societies, debased our hard fought for liberties and caused untold damage to children, not to mention accumulating enormous debt and destroying countless lives and livelihoods.
Joe Hildebrand, writing in news.com.au:
And now we have formal confirmation from the Australian Bureau of Statistics that not only did so-called “Covid deaths” account for just 1% of fatalities during the pandemic, but 92% of that 1% were people with pre-existing health problems ranging from pneumonia to heart disease.
All the scare-mongering was wrong, all the catastrophic predictions were wrong, all the fear and fury at lifting of restrictions was wrong, wrong, wrong.
The wrong end of the stick
Besides the lack of originality in these opinion pieces, there are quite a few problems here. All of them managed to get at least one of the basic numbers from the ABS report wrong, with some of them messing up multiple stats. They’re also misrepresenting what the numbers actually mean.
Paul Murray got both the number of people who died from Covid wrong, and the proportion of deaths where people had a chronic condition, prompting this fact check by AAP after his incorrect numbers were shared on Facebook and Twitter. The actual number of deaths where only Covid was reported on the death certificate was 220, not 83 – which is actually the number of people who died primarily due to something else, but who had also tested positive to Covid.
The same mistake was made by the Herald Sun in a now-deleted tweet linking to Rita Panahi’s piece, which is strange as Panahi does not use the 83 figure.
Fordham, Panahi, Hildebrand and Murray all got the percentage of Covid deaths with underlying health conditions wrong, citing 91% or 92% when it should actually be 69.5%.
They’ve used the number of cases where only Covid was reported on the death certificate, which is 220 or 8.6% of total Covid deaths in this period, and subtracted this from the total.
However, they should have included a further 560 deaths where another condition was “reported with causal sequence of events only”. This means those people did not have a pre-existing chronic condition prior to the chain of events leading to death, but conditions that developed due to Covid-19, such as pneumonia.
While this may seem a bit complicated, the ABS clearly states within the same report the actual number of deaths with pre-existing chronic conditions in very plain terms: “Pre-existing chronic conditions were reported on death certificates for 1,776 (69.5%) of the 2,556 deaths due to Covid-19 deaths outlined in this report.”
A chronic problem
Another major issue is that several of these commentators imply that deaths are somehow not fully attributable to Covid if people had a chronic health condition.
Again, the ABS report states in clear terms that this is not the case: “The majority [2,556] of these 2,639 deaths were due directly to Covid-19”.
While various health conditions and other factors such as age can put you at an increased risk of dying if you catch Covid, it is an increased risk, not a guaranteed death sentence. To put it another way – if it weren’t for Covid these people would not have died when they did.
It’s also important to realise that a very large number of Australians have chronic health conditions (I’ve got one myself!), so implying that deaths of entirely healthy people are somehow more important is unhelpful.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) estimates that 47% of Australians aged 18 and over had one or more chronic health conditions, and this rises to 60% in the 45 to 64 age bracket, and to 80% for those over 65.
While the AIHW figures include conditions like back problems and mental and behavioural conditions not included in the ABS Covid deaths report, other figures show how widespread these conditions are. One in three Australians have high blood pressure, and a similar proportion of adults are obese. Both are on the list of the pre-existing chronic conditions listed in the ABS report.
Unfortunately, according to data from social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle, most of these articles have been enthusiastically shared by accounts known for sharing anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown conspiracy theories. This is likely because questioning how many deaths are actually due to Covid alone is an ongoing theme for these communities.
The Y2K fallacy
Another issue with several of the opinion pieces is that they make an argument that I’ve taken to calling the “Y2K fallacy“ for lack of a better term.
They’re using the comparatively low number of Covid deaths relative to other deaths over the same period to make the argument that people overstated the seriousness of Covid or the need for various interventions.
However, this ignores the fact that this comparatively low number of deaths has been achieved by interventions including lockdowns, border controls, mask rules and vaccinations, and without these, the death toll would have undoubtedly been higher. One estimate in October 2020 suggested Australia’s interventions may have saved 16,000 lives. The prime minister, Scott Morrison, suggested in May 2021 that Australia had avoided the loss of 30,000 lives.
That’s not to say that every intervention necessarily worked, or that there wasn’t a health and financial cost to strict policies like lockdowns and border controls, but to argue that these death numbers show that we have “needlessly crippled our societies” is misleading in the extreme.
