Excess Deaths during COVID-19 pandemic in Alberta, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: To determine if there was excess mortality in Alberta, Canada during the pandemic. We sought to confirm if excess mortality affected all age groups equally and determine what proportion of excess deaths is directly related to COVID-19. METHODS & MATERIALS: Excess mortality was calculated by comparing observed to expected number of deaths. Monthly Crude death rates (CDR) for 2015 to 2019 was calculated by dividing monthly deaths by the mid-year population. Expected deaths was calculated by multiplying mean monthly CDR by the mid-year population in 2020 and the projected mid-year population in 2021 to calculate expected deaths. Age-adjusted monthly mortality rates for January 2020 to March 2021 was compared to the previous 5 years. RESULTS: From January 2020 to May 2021 there was a 11% excess mortality corresponding to an average of 248 monthly excess deaths with a minimum of 49 deaths in January 2020 (no COVID-19-related deaths) and a maximum of 781 excess deaths in December 2020. COVID-19 related deaths (n=2266) account for 53.8 % of the total excess deaths (n=4214) that occurred in the 17 months. Increase in all cause -excess deaths was proportionately higher, and in significantly greater numbers, in the younger age groups. Deaths directly linked to COVID-19 were: 8 (20-29 years), 12 (30-39 years), 32 (40-49 years), 74 (50-59 years), 225 (60-69 years), 409 (70-79 years), and 1274 (>80 years) Statistically significant increases in monthly drug poisoning deaths from March 2020 to April 2021 with a total of 1819 deaths. Excess 731 drug poisoning deaths representing 18.2 % of total all-cause excess mortality affected mostly those age 25-60. 53.9 % of all excess deaths is directly related to COVID-19 and 18.2% are drug poisoning related excess deaths. The remaining 27.9 % of excess deaths are likely due other factors such as limited access to urgent medical care. CONCLUSION: There was statistically significant increase in all-cause mortality. Although older adults are more likely to die of COVID-19, there was massive increase in non-COVID-19 related mortality among the youth. These should be factored in public policy decisions on epidemic/pandemic management.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".