The emergence of COVID-19 variants of concern and community response to shifting public health measures continue to influence the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada and worldwide.
To understand the direct and indirect consequences of the pandemic, it is important to measure excess mortality, which occurs when there are more deaths than expected in a given period. It should be noted that, even without a pandemic, there is always some year-to-year variation in the number of deaths in a given week. This means that the number of expected deaths should fall within a certain range of values. There is evidence of excess mortality when weekly deaths are consistently higher than the expected number, but especially when they exceed the range of what is expected over several consecutive weeks.
Provisional data show an estimated 49,490 excess deaths in Canada from the end of March 2020 to the middle of July 2022, 7.4% more deaths than expected without the pandemic. During this period, at least 40,840 deaths were directly attributed to COVID-19.
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