Statistics Canada continues to inform current and future public health policy through its collection and dissemination of mortality statistics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, the Canadian Vital Statistics Death Database is releasing updated provisional data, covering the period from January 2020 to January 2022.
By the end of November 2021, the highly transmissible Omicron variant was detected in Canada. In the weeks and months that followed, both the number of reported infections and hospital stays related to COVID-19 increased, peaking in January 2022, with the highest counts of infections and hospitalizations ever recorded during the pandemic.
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 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.
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).