Weekly COVID-19 deaths haven't dropped to zero for first time

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Australia remains yet to record zero weekly deaths from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, despite federal health data yesterday showing the milestone had been reached.

The Department of Health and Aged Care’s rolling seven-day average at one point showed the number of deaths fell to zero briefly in March, however it has since been confirmed there were fatalities linked to the virus that week.

Hospital admissions are also at their lowest since January 2022.

While hailed as a “milestone”, some experts were sceptical about the data from the outset.

“While this is encouraging data, it’s almost certainly not correct that there were zero COVID deaths in that week,” infectious disease modeller Associate Professor James Wood, from the University of New South Wales, said.

“Instead, our near real-time reporting system for reporting of deaths has mostly wound down and we now need to rely on the slower ABS reporting which tends to occur at about a two-month delay.”

Karen Cutter, the chair of the Actuaries Institute’s Mortality Working Group, agreed that the error was due to delays in how the data is collected and processed.

“The graph on the federal health website showing COVID-19-associated deaths is based on date of death, but there are delays between when a death occurs and when it is reported,” she said.

“So for the most recent month shown, the number of deaths is vastly understated as not all deaths have been reported.

“This is particularly the case for the most recent week, where it is almost impossible for a death to happen and for it to be captured in the federal database.

“As such, to state that there have been no COVID-19 deaths in the last week based on this graph is simply not true.”

Wood estimated COVID-19 infections are still high, previously saying 20 to 25 per cent of Australians had caught the virus in the most recent wave.

“Clearly, we are in a trough after the wave caused by the subvariant JN.1 at the end of last year,” University of South Australia chair of biostatistics Professor Adrian Esterman said.

“However, that trough is still at a fairly high level, with over 22,000 confirmed cases so far in March, and presumably many times that number of actual cases.”

Vaccination has been credited with lowering mortality.

Esterman said Australia may be in its best position since the beginning of the pandemic, but warned against complacency.

“Last month there were over 250 active COVID-19 outbreaks in residential aged care homes, and only 36 per cent of Australians aged 75 and over have had a booster shot within the last six months,” he said.

“We see very little messaging from any of our governments encouraging elderly people to get vaccinated. This is not good enough. We should at the very least still be doing all we can to protect our vulnerable population.”

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