The excess death rate in Australia, meaning the rate of actual deaths above what was expected, hit a startling 13 percent for the first eight months of 2022, and the government should investigate what’s causing it, according to Australia’s prime actuarial body.

Using government-collected data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Actuaries Institute found an extra 15,400 people died in the first eight months of 2022, with about a third of these deaths having no connection to Covid. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported an even higher number of excess deaths — 17 percent above the historical average — though without accounting for demographic changes.

“Mortality doesn’t normally vary by more than 1 or 2 percent, so 13 percent is way higher than normal levels,” a spokesperson for the Actuaries Institute’s Covid-19 Mortality Working Group, Karen Cutter, said. “I think the government should be looking at it.”

Two-thirds of reported excess deaths are from Covid or listed as with Covid, meaning the virus wasn’t the main cause of death but was perhaps a contributing factor. Of the 33 percent of excess deaths unrelated to Covid, coronary artery disease, cancer, dementia, cerebrovascular diseases like stroke, diabetes, and a catchall “other unspecified diseases” take the top spots.  

The institute’s report does not come to any conclusions on the causes of these deaths, though it suggests several factors are at play. Among these are potential post-Covid mortality risks for heart disease and stroke, delays in emergency care and routine medical appointments and screenings, undiagnosed Covid, and an earlier-than-usual flu season after two years of lockdowns that saw low levels of respiratory viruses.

The paper also mentions mental health issues, unhealthy lifestyle changes during lockdown, and vaccine-related injury, though it says these likely played little-to-no role in the excess deaths spike.

The Chairman of Emergency Medicine at LIJ Valley Stream Hospital in New York, Salvatore Pardo, says these deaths are likely a “ripple effect of a lockdown,” but he says they need further investigation. “It’s been two years, so if people aren’t accessing care as they should and getting things identified, you’re going to see higher mortality,” he tells the Sun.

Australia imposed some of the harshest Covid mitigation measures of any western country. The government closed the borders in March 2020, forced its citizens into lockdowns for extended periods, developed a robust contact tracing program, and instituted what amounted to a western version of a “Zero Covid” policy. The city of Melbourne spent 262 days in lockdown, with residents only being allowed to leave their homes to go grocery shopping or exercise.

In late 2021, the government changed course. Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, told Aussies they must learn to “live with this virus, not to live in fear of it.” The country started opening up just as Omicron hit. Cases spiked in early 2022.

“When 2022 hit, Covid spread rapidly all through Australia,” Stanford University professor, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who authored the Great Barrington Declaration questioning the wisdom of lockdowns, said.  By this time, though, more than 90 percent of Australian adults were vaccinated against Covid, so the death rate was lower than many other countries hit during the initial waves. The deleterious health effects of long lockdowns, though, were starting to rear their heads.

“You’ve basically had a full year of lockdown harms that could’ve and should’ve been avoided,” Dr. Bhattacharya said, “during which children didn’t go to school, mass violations of civil liberties on a scale that was unimaginable before in liberal democracies, small businesses crushed, people skipping cancer treatment, and needed medical care, preventative care, anxiety and depression at catastrophic levels that Australia is going to be paying a cost for for a very long time.”

Dr. Pardo also says that the long-term impacts of Covid infection are not yet known, though the increases in cardiac diseases, strokes, and renal failure post-infection point to signs Covid may be a microvascular disease. Prior infection could be a cause of some of these non-Covid deaths, though he cautions that this is just a theory. “Attributing disease or progression of disease or new disease to Covid really is still unknown,” he says. “It has to be analyzed.”

Eurostat is also reporting increases in excess deaths in Europe in the summer of 2022, as compared to summer 2020 or 2021. In the United States, excess deaths continue to be elevated, though not near earlier peaks from Covid waves. Overdose deaths and other “deaths of despair” in particular have increased dramatically. Any massive societal disruption, like war or a pandemic, will increase excess death rates.

Some are pointing to Covid vaccine-related injuries as the cause of excess deaths in otherwise healthy young adults. Of the 3,110 “other unspecified diseases” excess deaths reported in Australia, the Actuaries Institute paper states that 25 percent are likely from non-ischaemic heart diseases, of which myocarditis is one.

Assuming all of these are vaccine-related deaths — a major assumption, no doubt — this would still not account for the bulk of the rise in excess deaths being reported down under. Still, more research is needed on vaccine-related injuries.

The vaccines, though, would be “the last thing on the list,” says Dr. Pardo. He says these deaths need studying, and that understanding exactly what Covid is and its effects long-term on the body are key to that. Until then, it’s all conjecture. “It’s still a novel virus in many ways,” Says Dr. Pardo, “and its true effect on the body is unknown.”