Excess deaths in Australia reveal Covid-19’s long, lethal tail

Australians are still dying at higher rates than before the pandemic, reflecting how Covid-19’s lingering effects may be driving a sustained increase in death and disease around the globe.

Excess mortality – the increase above the expected toll had the pandemic not occurred – was 5 per cent for Australia in 2023, the Sydney-based Actuaries Institute said in a report Monday, significantly higher than the 1-2 per cent excess seen in years of crushing seasonal influenza epidemics.

The elevated toll in a country with high Covid vaccination rates reveals the long tail of a pandemic that not only caused the most deaths in a century, but left many survivors with lingering ailments, and disrupted medical care for patients with other conditions.

More than four years on, hospitals are still grappling with an unexpected increase in coronary artery disease.

“Covid will continue to have an impact for some years to come,” actuary Karen Cutter, a spokesperson for the institute’s mortality working group, said. “The ‘new normal’ level of mortality is likely to be higher than it would have been if we hadn’t had the pandemic.”

The Australian findings support growing evidence that Covid-19 worsened health across populations, especially the elderly and marginalised racial and ethnic minority groups, resetting the baseline for expected mortality.

The health impact across the United States may be felt for years, said Robert Anderson, chief of the statistical analysis and surveillance branch of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, who is trying to calibrate a new measure of excess mortality in the wake of the coronavirus.

“We know that it has done damage to people who’ve survived the virus,” he said