Last Friday the Central Statistics Office released the quarterly “vital statistics” summary of births and deaths in Ireland for the last three months of 2022. These figures were highly anticipated by some, because of the ongoing situation across much of the globe where deaths appear to be continuing to occur at elevated levels compared to the pre-covid baseline. If you have spent any time at all on the internet over the past two years, you will be aware there are three hotly contested potential explanations for the sustained increase: First, that Covid hasn’t really gone away and that many extra deaths are really delayed deaths resulting from people never fully recovering from the disease; second, that covid lockdowns seriously damaged people’s health; and third – and most controversially – that there is some link between covid vaccination and excess death.
If you were hoping that the Central Statistics Office would release figures that would help resolve that debate, then you should be disappointed. You should be even more disappointed though that the CSO doesn’t appear willing to fully stand over its own figures. This is the statistician’s note appended to the release:
Commenting on the release, Seán O’Connor, Statistician in the Vital Statistics Division, said: “Care should be taken comparing Q4 2022 and Q4 2021 figures, due to the HSE cyber-attack in May 2021. As a result of the cyber-attack, General Register Offices (GRO) around the country were closed and the registration of births/deaths/marriages were not possible for a number of weeks – which is likely to have impacted the recording in Q2, Q3 and Q4 2021. This change in circumstances for the registration processes should be considered when looking at year-on-year changes in Q4 2022.
Bearing this in mind and using the registration figures available to us, the number of deaths in Quarter 4 2022 decreased by 477 or 5.5% compared with the same period last year. There were 254 deaths due to COVID-19 in this period accounting for one in thirty two (3.1%) of all deaths in the period.
Deaths due to malignant neoplasms (cancer) and circulatory disease were the biggest causes of death in Q4 2022 and accounted for more than half (56.4%) of all deaths.
In other words, while the headline number of deaths has fallen, it may actually have decreased by even more because the state was unable to fully record deaths for a period due to a cyberattack.
With respect to the CSO, this makes no sense: While the imputing of data might be delayed as a result of a hack, the date and time of almost every death is a matter of public record. It should be, and should have been, a priority for the agency to allocate each death to the appropriate time period, so that proper comparisons can be drawn.
In the absence of the full data, there are limited conclusions that can be drawn. What can be said is that deaths appear to have spiked after the pandemic, and remained at an elevated – but not dramatically elevated – level since:
Government needs to answer for those red boxes. pic.twitter.com/bDbwuI9FpL
— Damian (@raggedlines) May 26, 2023
If you are looking for definitive evidence that these deaths were caused by lockdowns, or vaccines, or covid itself, then that evidence simply is not in these figures. What is clear, however, is that deaths are up since the pandemic response.
It is worth recalling at this point that the purpose of the pandemic response was to save lives, not to lose them. The slogan enacted, if you recall, was “stay home, save lives”. In the Central Statistics Office figures, there simply is no evidence that any lives were saved. There is no fall in the death rate.
Now, the problem here is that the case for the lockdown remains unfalsifiable: If you claim, for example, that without a lockdown, thousands more would have died, then there is no way to disprove your claim. It is a claim that has the quality of religious belief – it requires you to have faith that it is true.
All that we can say, definitively, is that the Covid Pandemic has passed, and people are now dying at elevated rates – even accounting for population increase – than they were before. That suggests at minimum that the lockdown had a defined cost, and an undefinable benefit. We can prove that people are dying today, but we cannot prove that more would have died without one.
As to my readers who continue to fervently believe that the role of the vaccine is central to the increased death rate, that, too, has something of a religious quality: It cannot be proved with these figures, nor can it be disproved. There is certainly a correlation in that deaths appeared to rise after the vaccine – suggesting that it did not save many lives – but there is no evidence of causation. The other explanations – that it was lockdown suppressing cancer screenings or doctors visits or just plain causing depression and ill health – are just as plausible.
The most depressing thing about the figures though is the lack of accountability for them.
The figures are slightly messed up, but they do show a sustained rise in deaths. And yet the very media and political establishment which terrified the public into staying home and saving lives now shows zero interest in the lives that are being lost, at this point, on an ongoing basis.
It’s not good enough. And on that, those who believe in conspiracy theories around this issue can hardly be entirely blamed.