Covid-19 kills five times more people than flu in 2024

Five times as many Australians are dying from Covid-19 as the flu five years after the outbreak of the global pandemic, shock new research has revealed.

More Australians died of Covid-19 than flu in 2024. File picture: iStock

Five times as many Australians are dying from Covid-19 than influenza five years after the outbreak of the global pandemic, shock research published by the Actuaries Institute shows.

New analysis by the Institute’s Mortality Working Group of mortality between January and November 2024 found 3676 people died from Covid-19 – 69 per cent more than predicted.

Another 14,780 people died from non-Covid-19 respiratory conditions including influenza and pneumonia – nearly 1000 or 7 per cent more than predicted, following analysis of the latest Provisional Mortality Statistics released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Covid-19 deaths at 3676 were five times more than the 728 recorded for influenza. Another 2460 people died from pneumonia, 10 per cent higher than expected.

Chair of the Institute’s Mortality Working Group, actuary Jennifer Lang, said while there had been slightly fewer deaths from Covid in 2024 than in 2023, the reduction had not been as great as expected.

“Covid-19 was a much more significant cause of death than the flu in 2024, with pneumonia and other lower respiratory disease also markedly higher than predicted,” she said.

The reduction in Covid deaths in Australia from 2023 to 2024 was not as great as expected. File picture.

“The first 11 months of 2024 were materially worse than we anticipated for Covid-19, in terms of both the peak mortality wave and the underlying mortality between waves. While at the beginning of 2024, deaths from Covid-19 were not as high as in the equivalent wave in 2023, since then the mortality from Covid-19 waves and in-between waves has been very similar to 2023, rather than reducing as we anticipated,” she said.

“Those waves appear to have kept deaths from Covid-19 stubbornly high, which contrasts with the drop we saw from 2022 to 2023 when the number of deaths from COVID-19 more than halved from 10,300 to 4,600.”

The Mortality Working Group also found there were 1400 more deaths in the first 11 months of 2024 than had been predicted.

“As a result, Australia’s excess mortality rate — or the number of actual deaths compared to our predictions – was 1 per cent which can be fully explained by excess Covid-19 deaths,” she said.

Respiratory conditions caused 10.8 per cent of all deaths in 2024, with Covid-19 accounting for 2.1 per cent of total mortality.