Irish Excess Deaths

EXCESS DEATHS:
Excess deaths are a measurement of the difference between the actual all cause mortality of a country for a period and the ‘expected’ mortality under normal conditions.
Actual mortality is an objective figure as recorded by the General Register Office in Ireland by year of occurrence while the ‘expected’ mortality is a comparative average baseline figure usually based on the previous five years mortality.
A more complex baseline can be used by using actuarial models to try and estimate expected mortality taking account of age and sex profile, population increase, life expectancy etc.
In Ireland, the Central Statistics Office doesn’t publish the ACTUAL deaths occurring for a year analysed by age and cause until 22 months after the year end ie the 2022 figures will be released on 31/10/24.
Even then these figures are not complete due to late registrations, inquests etc.
As things stand with CSO published data, the only years since 2019 that ‘excess deaths’ can be measured, are 2020 and 2021, but even these figures will be understated due to the above process of late registration and publication.
In Ireland, we have the benefit of an online funeral notice service called RIP.IE that provides real time mortality data that the CSO has tested and says can be used to measure excess deaths.
CSO testing shows that 96% apprx of all deaths appear on RIP.IE.
This use of cleansed RIP.IE data allows a real time excess mortality estimate to be made for Ireland without waiting until 3 to 4 years after the year end for release of CSO figures.
The CSO itself stands over this method by submitting weekly RIP.IE data to EUROSTAT for the publication of their monthly excess mortality figures.
Because of the pandemic, many analysts feel that any year from 2020 onwards cannot be used as part of the baseline because these weren’t ’normal’ conditions and to use them would understate excess mortality.
EUROSTAT use a four-year average based on 2016 to 2019 for this reason.