Anomalous Elderly Deaths during Ontario's 2020 Covid Pandemic

Abstract

Total deaths in the two elderly age groups in Ontario Canada were analyzed using two approaches to compare pre-Covid deaths with Covid 2020 deaths. The linear trendline of 2014-2019 pre-Covid deaths was used to de-trend the data relative to 2014, including for 2020. 1. Annual averages and standard deviations of the de-trended data showed that the 85+ age deaths in 2020 were within the 99.9% expected range of the preceding years, but the 65-84 group was well outside the 99.9% range. It can be argued that 2020 deaths in the 85+ group are not unusual when a high degree of certainty like 99.9% is selected. However, the 65-84 deaths are excessively high under any reasonable circumstances. Excess deaths were estimated at about +5% for both male and female in the 85+ group, whereas in the younger 65-84 group, males had +8% excess while females had +6% excess. 2. Successive weekly averages and standard deviations were calculated for each year in 2014-2019 and compared to the 2020 weeks. Deaths in the 85+ group were below normal in the first quarter of 2020, rising to a high ‘winter-type’ peak due to the Covid outbreak, followed by a below-normal summer and above-normal fourth quarter. The 65-84 deaths also started out low, but the second quarter Covid peak lingered, and both third and fourth quarters were above normal, leading to the overall high death rate of this group relative to the 85+ group. Influenza had caused a similar anomaly in April 2014, though with an infection rate an order of magnitude lower, deaths were far less extreme than in April 2020.