Full review of Australia’s Covid 2639 deaths revealed in ABS data

Thousands of Australians have died from coronavirus since the start of the pandemic — but health experts say this isn’t the worst result.

Details of all Covid-19 related deaths in Australia since the start of the pandemic have been released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

A total of 2639 people died from or with coronavirus between January 2020 and 31 January, 2022.

Of those deaths, 2556 were directly due to the virus, while 83 people died from other causes, such as cancer, but were Covid-positive at the time of death.

The report also revealed the elderly and those with pre-existing chronic health conditions accounted for a large proportion of overall deaths.

Thousands of Australians have died from Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

Deaths occurred mainly among those aged 80-89 years (with the median age 84.3), with those suffering chronic cardiac conditions and dementia the most at risk of developing Covid-19 complications leading to death.

Almost 70 per cent of Covid deaths were among those with pre-existing health conditions.

Victoria was by far the worst state for coronavirus-related deaths, accounting for 1557 deaths.

While many have questioned the need for lockdowns and restrictions, health experts say the proof was in the data.

Deakin University epidemiology chair Professor Catherine Bennett said it was easier to focus on the total number of deaths instead of those that were prevented.

“There’s a truism in public health that people don’t know how well we are doing because you don’t see the disease you prevent,” Prof Bennett said.

“It’s hard for people to understand the deaths we avoided, when actually, the deaths we avoided is the marker of success and the interventions that were put in place.”

Professor Bennett said it was unsurprising our community’s most vulnerable were over-represented in coronavirus-related deaths.

“There is disparity in where the deaths occur. We know that aged care was a site of vulnerability and ethnic groups were over-represented,” she said.

Lockdowns helped drive down death rates in Australia, ABS data shows. Picture: Quinn Rooney

Professor Bennett rejected claims statewide lockdowns were unnecessary because only a small section of the community was at risk of dying from coronavirus.

“It’s not like Omciron where everyone will now be exposed, but when there was containment in place (through lockdowns) that exposure was concentrated in different parts of the community,” she said.

“During the second wave in Victoria, during the Kappa and Delta waves, (the virus) concentrated in areas where you have the greatest exposure through work and within communities in areas where there are a lot of casual workers or people who can’t work from home or who live in large households — all of those things meant the virus reproductive number was different in different parts of the city.”

Monash University’s head of epidemiological modelling unit Associate Professor James Trauer said if lockdowns weren’t in place, Australia would have been similar to position to the United Kingdom.

The elderly were the most at-risk community during the pandemic. Picture: John Feder

“What we had seen in Australia is the all-cause mortality (total number of all causes of death) had not surged above what we would been seeing, in increasing deaths and the flu.”

“In the UK, they have had two waves and their all-cause mortality spiked way above the baseline with Alpha and Delta variants. They had a huge wave of daily deaths for months, whereas our all-cause mortality was at a baseline.”

Professor Trauer said daily case numbers and infection rates were important during the earlier phases of the pandemic, but now it was time Australia used deaths as a metric.

“If Covid transitions into an endemic state, heaps of people will be exposed and infected each year. This will mean less of a focus on cases and infections, with deaths being the most important metric of how well we are doing and our need to vaccinate program,” he said.