What is New Zealand’s TRUE Excess Mortality Story?

*UPDATE* This data has now been extended to October 2023, with the Vaccine rollout applied against it.

NZ Covid Vaccines Administered v Excess Mortality and Covid Deaths – January 2020 – October 2023

There have been many claims that NZ had “zero excess mortality across the Covid pandemic”, most recently apparently from David Seymour, ACT MP/Leader and Epsom’s guy.

tl;dr: for every 1,000 doses of vaccine, there have been 0.74 Excess Deaths.

Fact Check: David Seymour Says We Have No Excess Deaths. Is He Right?

Just for your @dbseymour You've shorn off votes with your Pfizer ignorance and arrogance.https://t.co/5zd8s0pUTn via @Hatchard Report

— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) May 10, 2023

In that thread, somebody uses the following graph to back up David’s claim. Aside from the fact that I could randomly draw a graph to prove anything I wanted, as long as I didn’t have to provide source data..

It says “ESTIMATED cumulative excess deaths per 100,000”.

Estimated? What? Why? We literally have the live Excess/Actual/Covid mortality numbers at our fingertips. https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676, you can clearly see that we had a non-zero Excess Mortality.

As far as Graphs go.. Projection – NO. Average – Yes.

There are also graphs that show our Excess Mortality as a percentage based on Projections.

Projections like “TENS OF THOUSANDS WILL DIE OF COVID!!!”.

And when only 7,000 extra New Zealanders died in 2021 and 2022, they could say “Yay! We said 10s of thousands would die! Only 7,000 more than normal did! We had.. zero Excess Mortality!” – No.

Why would anyone believe that? You’d throw the script away, to quote Woody Harrelson.

I prefer this graph from Our World in Data. It shows us the percentage difference between the number of people who are dying now, and the average number of people who died in the 5 years prior.

It’s essentially: How many more people are dying now than normally would have been in the last 5 years? And it’s a lot.

I have pulled all the Deaths, Covid Deaths, and Excess Mortality stats for NZ from 2020-present and intend to make this even easier to understand if I can.

Excess Mortality Graphs for New Zealand – 2020 – 2023

Via the OECD Mortality tool, I simply plugged the data into a graph.

The blue bars show the raw EXTRA DEATHS per week. The line shows the Percentage change.

We can see that in 2020, there was a 25-week period of Negative Excess Mortality. This was about 1050 fewer people dying than average. That was almost zeroed-out by the Positive EM for the rest of 2020, leaving us with -158.8 fewer people dead in 2020 than average.

In 2021, there were only 6 weeks where Excess Mortality was negative, for a total of -90.8 dead people. The rest of 2021 saw more people die than the average, in total: 2169.

2022, every week had positive Excess Mortality. 5,697 extra people dead than average. The worst week was week 12, with 196 more people dying than average, or 33.8% more.

2023 so far (to 12 March): All Positive Excess Mortality. So far, 1,116 more people have died than the average.

A total of around 9.000.

When we look at how many vaccinations have been given (11,988,834), that’s around 0.74 Excess Deaths per dose.

SC out for the moment.