MONTREAL – Researchers have difficulty explaining why Quebec had the highest official COVID-19 death toll in the country despite a relatively low excess death toll between March 2020 and October 2021.
A new study published Monday by the Canadian Medical Association Journal tried to answer that question, but it fell short.
“I’d say that’s something we need to understand right now,” Kimberlyn McGrail, a professor at the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia, said in an interview.
The study, “Excess Mortality, COVID-19 and Health Systems in Canada,” says Quebec had 4,033 excess deaths between March 2020 and October 2021, but reported 11,470 deaths from COVID-19. almost three times as much. It is the largest breach recorded in Canada during the pandemic. Excess deaths refer to the degree to which the observed deaths exceed the expected deaths according to the models of previous years.
McGrail said he observed too many factors to offer a definitive answer.
“Quebec was an interesting case,” he said. “What we see is that in Quebec, you have these periods when there is a high excess of mortality, but you also have periods when the rates of excess mortality are below zero, which means that there were fewer deaths. in those weeks than expected. “
Between February 2021 and July 2021, for example, Quebec’s mortality rate was lower than in the years before the pandemic, but provincial officials reported up to 10 deaths from COVID-19 each. 100,000 people every day.
“I don’t have a definitive answer,” McGrail said. “That’s part of the reason I was interested in writing the document, because of the amount of things that could be there.”
One of the reasons the gap could be explained, he said, is that Quebec officials were testing many people who, for reasons unrelated to COVID-19, were already close to death.
“Quebec was doing more testing, especially with people who were clearly nearing the end of their lives,” McGrail said. “Maybe they were picking up people who had COVID-19 who would actually die in the next few days or weeks independently.”
In early May, the Quebec Institute of Statistics released a report stating that there had been an excess of 6,400 deaths between the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and March 12, 2022. The province had officially reported of more than 15,000 deaths from COVID-19 during this period.
In response to the report, Prime Minister François Legault said data from the Quebec Institute of Statistics indicated that health orders imposed by his government had worked to reduce deaths in the province. “What this says is that the measures we have put in place over the last two years have paid off,” he said at the time.
McGrail’s study indicated that Nova Scotia had the lowest proportion of COVID-19 deaths to excess deaths. The province reported 98 deaths from COVID-19 during March 2020 and October 2021, but there were 217 fewer people who died during this period compared to what was expected based on previous years.
Although McGrail was cautious in providing definitive answers to explain the gap between Quebec’s excess mortality and its COVID-19 mortality rate, Frédéric Fleury-Payeur with the province’s statistical institute, he offered various theories.
One explanation, he said in an interview on Monday, is that the elderly stayed inside more than usual between March 2020 and October 2021, which led to fewer opportunities to get hurt.
“Falls among the elderly are still a major cause of death,” Fleury-Payeur said. “It causes a fracture of the hip or other bones, and because older people have been less mobile during periods of isolation and curfew, it could have played a role.”
Another explanation, he said, is that doctors in Quebec included COVID-19 as a cause of death in medical reports more liberally than doctors in other provinces. He said the medical community in Canada knows that medical reports in Quebec are more detailed than in other provinces.
“We’ve known for a long time that there are more details in the cause of death section in Quebec (medical reports) than in other provinces,” Fleury-Payeur said. “When the pandemic began, were Quebec doctors, by custom or tradition, more sensitive to identifying and reporting every suspected death with COVID-19?”
Fleury-Payeur said a full picture of the situation will be available when all forensic reports of deaths during the pandemic are made public and studied.
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on May 30, 2022.
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This story was produced with the financial assistance of Meta and the Canadian Press News Fellowship.
Virginie Ann, The Canadian Press