As part of Statistics Canada's commitment to providing timely and relevant information on COVID-19 and its impact on Canadians, a new updated provisional dataset from the Canadian Vital Statistics Death Database, covering the period from January 2020 to December 2021, was released today. The Omicron variant was detected in Canada at the end of November 2021. Subsequently, many provinces and territories observed an increase in COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and admissions to intensive care units, with those figures generally peaking in January.
To understand both the direct and indirect consequences of the COVID-19 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 people who die 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.
After accounting for changes in the population, such as aging, an estimated 28,229 excess deaths were reported in Canada from March 2020 to the end of October 2021, 6.1% more deaths than what would be expected if there was no pandemic. Over this same period, 28,125 deaths occurred that were directly attributed to COVID-19.
Contact information
For more information, or to enquire about the concepts, methods or data quality of this release, contact us (toll-free 1-800-263-1136; 514-283-8300; infostats@statcan.gc.ca) or Media Relations (statcan.mediahotline-ligneinfomedias.statcan@statcan.gc.ca).