Some observations from Canadian Vital Statistics Death (CVSD) Database related to the “Elephant in the Room”
In the beginning of this year, a paper analyzing CVSD was published. With this year approaching its end, one can see whether the paper observations are still valid - they are.
In the beginning of this year, a paper was published by three Canadian Professors on the results obtained from the Canadian Vital Statistics Death Database using the Open Canada Vital Statistics Tracker Web App (https://o-canada.shinyapps.io/vitals):
“Some observations from Canadian Vital Statistics Death (CVSD) Database related to the ‘Elephant in the Room’”, https://open-canada.github.io/vitals/comment.pdf
The main findings and conclusions from this paper are quoted below. With this year approaching its end, lets see which of them are still valid. It appears that all of them, some becoming more pronounced - marked in bold below.
Data as of December 2022 (pasted from https://o-canada.shinyapps.io/vitals)
Data as of December 2021 (pasted from the paper):
“Canada provides open access to their Canadian Vital Statistics - Death (CVSD) data [1] that show weekly mortality rates categorized by the cause of death defined by the "International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems" Revision 10 (ICD-10). […] In this paper, it is used to conduct temporal and regional cross-factor analysis of all reported and unreported causes of death in Canada since pandemic and the start of mass vaccination. For this purpose, an interactive Open Source Web Application (App) is developed [3], using which a number of (un)expected observations related to the pandemic and vaccination are made. These are described below. ‘ME’ indicates Mean weekly mortality rate (number of deaths per million per week).
At national level, it is observed that, despite the large number of COVID case numbers that have been reported since the declaration of the pandemic, the total number of deaths has remained stable (ME=152.2). Furthermore, in contrast to the historically observed trends, one observes a slight decrease in the total number of deaths and consistent decrease in practically all (except COVID) death causes since the start of the pandemic (negative correlation with date). The number of COVID deaths (ME=7.7) is considerably lower than that of leading causes, which remain to be Malignant neoplasms [C00-C97] (ME=38) and Diseases of heart [I00-I09, I11, I13, I20-I51] (ME=24.7), and other reported causes combined (ME=64.3). The increase in reporting of COVID deaths correlates with the decrease in reporting of other causes of deaths.
Examining the death statistics during the pandemic closer, one can further identify four distinct periods, for each of which the following observations are made.
*Period 1 (Early pandemic pre-vaccination phase)* is characterized by varying policies between East (Ontario and Quebec) and West (Alberta and British Columbia) provinces [4] and includes data from the "first wave", starting from 14 March 2020 (first COVID-19 death in Canada) ending 30 July 2020 (end of the "first wave"). It is observed that in this period East provinces have significantly lower COVID death rate compared to that in West provinces (ME 1.9 and 1.8 in Alberta and British Columbia vs. 33.2 and 10.3 in Quebec and Ontario). Looking at the death toll only, one could state that West provinces did not experience the first COVID "wave". The number of Ill-defined and unspecified causes [R99] is slightly higher than but comparable to the historical data (ME=4.2 compared to 2.2). The “Information unavailable” category (NA) is introduced in this period, however no records under this category are yet reported.
*Period 2 (Later pandemic pre-vaccination phase)* starts 1 August 2020 and ends on 13 December 2020 (last day before the commencement of vaccination). It is characterized by much more consistent (same) health measures across provinces, and includes second wave, which, in contrast to the "first one", is now equally observed (as a spike of COVID deaths) in all main provinces (ME=6.5 and 4.4 in Alberta and British Columbia vs. 10.8 and 3.9 in Quebec and Ontario). The rate of [R99] deaths grows (ME=5.7). The rate of NA records is insignificant (ME=0.2).
*Period 3 (Early high-risk population vaccination phase)* is characterized by the small percentage of vaccinated people, includes post-Christmas third wave and runs from 14 December 2020 (when the first vaccination shot was administered in Canada) to 1 May 2021 (when vaccination rate reaches 3%). In this period, the rate of [R99] deaths continued to grow (ME=6.0). The rate of deaths with NA started to grow more rapidly (ME=7).
*Period 4 (Later general population vaccination phase)* corresponds to the period when the majority population of the country has become vaccinated, including low-risk people and children, with full vaccination rate growing rapidly from 3% in 1 May 2021 to 74% on 11 October (the last record in the CVSD database at the time of writing this communication). The main difference of this period from previous periods is seen in a significant jump in the rate of NA records, which started to grow exponentially in all provinces (ME=35 at national level). In observing this, it is noted that the provinces, as known from the description of CVSD database [1], collect and report statistics independently from each other.
To summarize, CVSD statistics show that since the start of mass vaccination, unreported cases have become (and remain to be) the most dominant portion of all deaths. There can be two main explanations for this. First, reporting of valid death causes has become significantly more difficult since the beginning of mass vaccination and one can wait until the reporting of valid death causes is resumed. Second, the data could in fact reflect the new normal in the Canadian death causes reporting, with the majority of deaths now being left unexplained. In either case, it is important to maintain a trustful Vital Statistics database, open for research and analysis. ….
We also encourage other data scientists and health practitioners around the world to take advantage of the free data visualization tools and open source codes, such as the ones provided with the Web App used here [3], to build similar comparative death causes trackers for other countries and regions. ...”
A year since the development of the Open Canada Vital Statistics Tracker Web App and publication of this paper, there have been several other interactive Web Applications built around the globe to monitor and track Vital Statistics (Deaths) data in many countries. These are now linked in referenced of this newsletter and include:
www.mortality.watch, www.usmortality.com, de.usmortality.com
Check them out - They have new data and extensions released every month. And stay tuned - more observations and evidence from Canadian data are coming soon!