As an Australia - battered by increasing unnatural disasters and a pandemic which never ends - comes to the final days of 2022, here is a brief summary of where the COVID-19 numbers now stand.
"Globally, as of 4:46pm CET, 9 December 2022, there have been 643,875,406 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 6,630,082 deaths, reported to WHO...Including 756,013 confirmed cases in the last 24 hours." [WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard]
As at 13 December 2022 there have been 13,592,315 new confirmed COVID-19 cases world-wide in the last 28 days and 41,383 COVID-19 deaths in the same period. [COVID-19 Dashboard, Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE), Johns Hopkins University]
NOTE: By the time the Morrison Government had been removed from office there was no consistent method of COVID-19 data collection across all jurisdictions in Australia and publicly released information was frequently designed to minimise or hide what federal and/or state governments judged to be politically sensitive statistics. There was also significant under reporting of infection numbers inbuilt into data collection. That situation has not changed to date.
According to the Australian Government Dept. of Health and Aging, in the 7 days up to 6 December 2022 a total of 108,983 cases of COVID-19 were reported across Australia, an average of 15,569 cases per day.
In the 14 days up to 9 December 2022 there were 351 reported COVID-19 deaths bringing the cumulative total of deaths since the start of the pandemic to 16,441 men, women & children, according to COVID LIVE.
In NSW in the 7 days up to 4pm 8 December 2022 there were 40,194 newly confirmed COVID-19 cases and 48 confirmed deaths reported to NSW Health.
Of these 1,526 people were ill enough to require hospitalisation, with 40 in intensive care units. Weekly new admissions to NSW hospitals appear to be running in the vicinity of 1,049 people on the wards and 59 to intensive care units.
A total of 954 of the newly confirmed cases in the 7 days up to 8 December were in the Northern Rivers region. An est. 50.41% of these cases were in Tweed Shire, 25.27% in Ballina Shire and 18.65% in Lismore City - with the remaining 5.67% spread across the other four local government areas in the region.
Compare these state and regional numbers with those of 1-11 December 2021 and it is shocking to see how the collapse of public health measures have affected the course of the pandemic in New South Wales and the Northern Rivers. The Northern Rivers in particular has gone from est. 3.85 daily COVID-19 cases in the 7 days up to 8 December 2021 to est. 136.28 daily COVID-19 cases in the 7 days up to 8 December 2022.
 |
| ABS, Provisional Mortality Statistics Jan-Aug 2022, released 25 Nov 2022. Click on image to enlarge |
The Conversation, 12 December 2022:
Last month, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released a report of mortality statistics. It showed that from January to July 2022, there were 17% more deaths (16,375) than the average expected for these months.
This historical average is based on an average of the deaths for 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021. They did not include 2020 in the baseline for 2022 data because it included periods where numbers of deaths were significantly lower than expected. The difference between the expected number of deaths based on historical data, and the actual number, is called “excess deaths”.
However, as the ABS points out in its report, using previous years as the predictor for the expected number of deaths does not take into account changes in population age structure over time, or potential improvements in mortality rates.
As we will see, the excess deaths this year were likely lower than the ABS estimate – but still overwhelmingly related to COVID and its effects on health….
The Actuaries Institute report shows 13% excess mortality for the first eight months of 2022 (approximately 15,400 deaths), substantially lower than the ABS estimate for the first seven months…..
Read the full article here.
