Sir, – A peculiar consequence of the pandemic experience has been that many people now access and analyse technical health data and variables in order to inform themselves.
While this is probably in many ways a good thing, such statistics are often hard to fully place in context and can be alarming if not seen in that light.
Writing in regard to a proposed evaluation of our national Covid response, Reamonn O’Luan (Letters, November 1st) suggests we ought to extend the process far beyond that particular problem into the entire area of our excess mortality rates.
In this variable, he notes we are recently “way above average for a period for which some countries are sometimes recording negative” values.
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It is important to appreciate that the “excess” in the term excess mortality refers to how a population compares with its own long-term rates. All being equal, the average should be zero, meaning that deaths are happening at the same rate as they were in the period used for comparison. This isn’t necessarily good, it just means stability.
The source he mentions, Eurostat, makes clear that it is comparing current weekly numbers of deaths with a pre-Covid period from 2016 to 2019. It is important to appreciate that countries that handled Covid poorly will have seen many frail patients die during it. They will now be likely to have low excess mortality as these more vulnerable patients have died. Secondly, a quirk of statistics is that smaller populations can generate bigger variations than large ones. It is notable that countries with very elevated values recently – Malta, Cyprus and Ireland – fit this category. The three with the lowest values, Lithuania, Latvia and Bulgaria are also quite small by population.
Finally, it’s fair to note that the data describe the actual number of deaths and are not adjusted for age or per capita. Ireland has grown in population since the reference period, as indicated by the census.
Our numbers of elderly are also increasing, with our over-65 demographic rising particularly sharply (“Ireland’s population ageing faster than anywhere else in Europe as births fall”, News, December 2nd, 2022) between the comparator period and today.
Ultimately then we are seeing more deaths in Ireland now than we were five to eight years ago because the country contains more people and far more of them are elderly.
It is likely that by locking down during Covid, in association with which we often had negative excess mortality, that a period of rebound will follow as the lives then saved fall prey to other causes. This, on a grand scale, probably explains that across the EU there is at present an excess mortality of about 6 per cent. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN O’BRIEN,
Kinsale,
Co Cork.