Analysis by Keith Rankin.
New Zealand has had the worst reported mortality rate for Covid19 in the world for the last two weeks, according to the international data. And by a significant margin. But you wouldn’t know it from the media. ‘Underwhelming’ is an overstatement. The best I could find was this from Reuters nearly two weeks ago. New Zealand COVID death rate at record levels, 22 July 2022.
From worldometer weekly trends, the comparable number to the 151 given by Reutersis 271, that’s 54 deaths per million people in the week to 1 August 2022. The top five countries (all attending the Commonwealth Games) are:
- New Zealand, 54 deaths per million
- Barbados, 33 deaths per million
- Isle of Man, 35 deaths per million
- (New Zealand revised, 33 deaths per million)
- Bermuda, 32 deaths per million
- Australia, 27 deaths per million
These are the data published on Monday 1 August. This screenshot shows the same table on Friday 22 July.
We should note that all these countries other than New Zealand and Australia have populations less than 300,000 people. (Barbados’s population is 5.75% of New Zealand’s.) For very small countries, just one death has a big impact on the death rate. Unlike these little countries, New Zealand has been in the ‘top ten’ in the world for published covid deaths continuously, for several months.)
For a few days, the people at Worldometer struggled to work out New Zealand’s new reporting system. But they eventually decided that the original measure – deaths within 28 days of a positive test for Covid19 – was both the most comparable with other countries, and the most indicative as a measure of when the deaths occurred.
(The statistic above for ‘New Zealand revised’ is the new number favoured by the Ministry of Health. It’s not shown on Worldometer, and shown here only for comparison. This number – people who would not have died had they not had Covid19 – includes a few people who tested positive more than 28 days before their deaths.)
For the last few months, New Zealand has consistently had double Australia’s weekly Covid19 death rate. Both countries saw substantial increases in Covid19 deaths last month.
Why is this news not being reported by the traditional mainstream media? It’s more than the combined total of deaths in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and the 2019 Christchurch Mosque tragedy. They were news.
A quick snapshot of other information, not easily accessible, about those who died with Covid19 in the last week:
- 86% of the deaths with covid in the last week were neither Māori, nor Pacific, nor Asian. Thus, mostly Pakeha.
- 83% of the deaths were people aged over 70 (ie all eligible – in principle though maybe not in practice – for four vaccination shots).
- 79% had had vaccination ‘boosters’ (though, for the vast majority of these, their immunity will have waned to minimal levels)
Good news for me on the personal front. I got my second vaccine booster yesterday, and without the intervention of petty bureaucracy to prevent me from doing so. (Refer: Answers Please? Tribulations af Getting a Covid19 Vaccine ‘2nd Booster’.) I’ll never know whether the first pharmacy simply had a wrong interpretation of the rules, or whether the Ministry of Health computer system was tweaked on Friday to fix the petty anomaly that I mentioned.)
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
