Five Years of Covid

and quick look at latest ABS mortality data

Two articles came out in the Australian Newspaper today. One reminding us that it is 5 years since the World Health Organisation declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020.

The Australian article is behind a paywall or available on phone news subscription. You can see the policeman in the image shrugging his shoulders and saying I know this doesn’t make sense, but you are not allowed to sit on the beach in the fresh air. This is in March 2020 in Victoria, so therefore before masks came into practice and things became more militant.

There is a similar free to air article by SBS news. This article has Paul Kelly, the Chief Medical Officer at the time, telling us:

"In that first year in particular ... people suddenly became very aware of what epidemiologists did," he said. "They knew how to spell it, they knew how to say it." As time moved on, so did people's understanding of public health. "They understood modelling, they understood infectious diseases and how they transmit. They knew a lot about vaccines," Kelly said.

It’s hard to read the platitudes, with no mention of the absurdities and realities of what went on.

SBS have done some reasonable reporting of recent, highlighting the plight of the vaccine injured in a show called Insight. Article here and contains a link to the show. It highlights the story of a young lady, Michelle, and her plight after serious vaccine injury and feeling of abandonment. The article does make a note that such adverse reactions are rare.

The other article in the Australian:

states:

Covid is continuing to drive mortality rates in Australia five years after the start of the pandemic, new research shows, proving how undiagnosed cases and the long-term health impacts of the pandemic have driven an enduring decline of life expectancy.

The “modelling” has been done by the Burnet Institute, with an Excess Mortality of 31,000 quoted up till November 2024. They seem to know that the continuing excess is caused by undiagnosed cases. I think the actual report is the one found on this page. The article also lets us know Australia could have been much worse off, with an estimate that it could have been 55,000, without the imposed control measures. The conclusion is that we need our own Centre for Disease Control.

The Scourge

I think the scourge has actually been corrupted modelling. I have previously gone into all the issues with official modelling. If I try again here the article will be too long. In Australia authorities make the most of the fact that Australia has a lower mortality rate, due to Covid, compared to other countries, and so we did something right. Epidemiologists, modelling etc…

There is a basic assumption made and that is that every excess death is caused by Covid. This belief system drives the modelling and all conclusions. There is no research or knowledge that shows that all the excess is all caused by Covid.

ABS November 2024 Update

Latest ABS data was released at the end of February 2025 and covers up till November 2024. In practice this data is accurate till about 3 months before the last data available (November 2024), in other words till about mid-year 2024. Numbers for the last three months are always subject to increase as further deaths are reported.

I take a look here at one of the narrowest age bands provided as we can do something with that. For example, I take Males, Age 75-84. 10 years is the narrowest age band in the publicly available data. We can adjust for population of this group, which is available from the ABS. I calculate the Age Specific Death rate for this group.

We see that prior to Covid the Age Specific Death Rate decreased consistently over time. People in this group were living longer. I fit a linear trend line to the years prior to 2021. Note that 2020 is not low relative to the existing trend.

We see a sudden jump in 2021. A big jump in 2022. We see continuing excess above trend in 2023 and 2024.

We know that those that sadly succumbed to Covid had on average more than 3 comorbidities, and had an average age greater than average age of death. At some point there should be a deficit in mortality as those people that died before their time, don’t die later.

There is no sign yet of this recovery. Also note that 2024 number will go up.

Population

While I was collating population data I noticed an interesting effect. Below is the population data for this group. Data points are quarterly.

I have fit a 2^nd order trend curve (dashed line) to data from first quarter 2015 to first quarter 2021. This matches the data in that range very closely and also fits as well past 2021 till mid-2023. But then we see population diverging away from trend. Close up of the end part of the curve:

Plotting the difference of actual population with the predicted trend gives the following graph.

If there had been no pandemic we would expect the line to hover above and below the zero line. I find it interesting there appears to be no decrease from trend in population in the high mortality year of 2022. There are other things to consider with respect to population trend. It’s possible that the population should be decreasing away from trend, as less people were being born in the years that enter the 75 year age group in 2023. I’ve looked into births at that time and it’s quite interesting, for another substack.

Final Thoughts

There is much more to unpack in the ABS latest report. The consistent excess in mortality appears to be now manifesting in population data.

When there is a religiously held belief system then it is impossible for modelers to do anything useful.