Recently the Government changed its tune, but you used to be a conspiracy theorist for pointing out there was a difference between dying with COVID or from COVID. Now with the official release of Australian Bureau of Statistics data we have it confirmed just how many of those who died had other contributing factors.
It’s just another tick on the list of things “conspiracy theorists” been saying all along that the Government has tried to deny the truth of.
Transcript
[Malcolm] Thank you Chair, and thank you all for being here. My questions have to do with death data, particularly from COVID and information gathering. Can I reference your diagram entitled, Data Flow for Doctor Certified Deaths? I think that’s it there. It’s off your website.
[Committee Member] Do you need a copy of that, Mr. Gruen?
[Dr. Gruen] It’s a question of whether it’s in this publication or not but I know a copy would be helpful.
[Committee Member] Not sure this is speeding things up.
[Malcolm] Multitasking.
[Dr. Gruen] So just in summary, it’s a really simple workflow. So it’s a data flow for doctor certified deaths. The workflow is, someone dies, death event, doctor certifies, or it goes to a funeral director, but that’s only a small percentage. And then from there it continues to where the doctor then sends a certification sent to the state births, deaths and marriages. And then from there, the state officers send data weekly to the ABS, that’s broad summary.
And of course Senator, it doesn’t include deaths that would go to the coroner, so it’s not all the deaths.
[Malcolm] Correct, but that’s a small number.
[Dr. Gruen] 20 percentish, I think.
[Malcolm] 20, okay.
[Dr. Gruen] I believe so.
[Malcolm] But they eventually get entered in later, when the coroner has resolved.
[Dr. Gruen] Yes.
[Malcolm] And we’ve also got the Queensland process here, but that just verifies what you’re saying. Can I have copy back please?
[Dr. Gruen] Yes, certainly.
[Malcolm] So is that correct?
[Dr. Gruen] If it came from our website, it’s correct.
[Malcolm] And my summary, which is backed up by the-
[Dr. Gruen] I think the summary, I didn’t hear anything in the summary that I would take exception to.
[Malcolm] Thank you. When a doctor certifies a death, they certify a cause of death, thank you. If the cause of death is unknown, the matter is referred to the coroner to decide. Between 86 and 89% of deaths are doctor certified, meaning we know the cause of death at the time we know of the death. So my question is, the transfer of doctor certified death data from the state to the ABS, how long does that take? And has this reporting time changed over the last three years?
[Dr. Gruen] We can take that on notice exactly how long it takes but certainly what we have started to do, and we started doing this, I think in 2020, was to start publishing deaths data purely on the basis of deaths certified by doctors. So before that, we had an annual publication of all deaths but it was very substantially delayed. So the annual publication would come out something like 10 months after the end of the year for which it was reporting. One of the other things that we did as a consequence of COVID, was to see whether we could provide useful information on mortality much faster, and so we instituted a new publication, which is monthly, which is called Provisional Mortality Statistics. And what we do is report on doctor certified deaths that we have collected up to that point in time.
[Malcolm] And then if they come in later because the doctor is slow, whatever, you add them.
[Dr. Gruen] Exactly, so in other words, if you look at the subsequent month’s publication, it will have slightly more of certified deaths in the previous month because new ones have been added, that’s correct.
[Malcolm] Okay. So referencing your website, the causes of death in Australia, the last data release, I think you may have explained this, was September 2021 for the period calendar 2020. That’s what you said, it was about nine or 10 months later. Is this the most recent data, other than the COVID data released on the 15th of February? That’s this one here, COVID mortality in Australia.
[Dr. Gruen] I’ve got it. So the answer is, the annual data is the deaths from both doctor and coroner certified. That’s the annual data, but we are as well as that, doing a monthly publication of just doctor certified deaths. Those come out monthly.
[Malcolm] So the annual is accurate in terms of, it got the coroners.
[Dr. Gruen] It’s complete.
[Malcolm] Complete, thank you. Yeah, they’re all accurate. So, let’s continue. So referencing the COVID-19 mortality in Australia which you have in front of you, issued 15th of February, 2022. Quote, it says, “COVID-19 deaths that occurred by 31st of January, 2022 that have been registered and received by the ABS.”, end of quote. So here we’ve got death data, and cause of death data that’s only two weeks old. Not three months old for single mortality figure or 10 months for the cause of death. Could you go through that report on the bottom of the first page, Mr. Gruen? 2,639 deaths where people died with or from COVID. What do you mean by with or from, specifically?
[Dr. Gruen] So that’s explained later in the document. The vast majority of them are from, a small number are with. So if you look at page three, it explains, there were 83 deaths, which were COVID-19 related. Sorry, I’m reading from a doc point in the middle of page three.
[Malcolm] No, no, I’ve got it sampled.
[Dr. Gruen] 83 deaths, which were COVID-19 related. The person died with COVID-19, confirmed or suspected, but it was not the underlying cause of death.
[Malcolm] So COVID was not the underlying cause, it was something else.
[Dr. Gruen] That’s right. So just to be clear, there were 2,704 deaths that were either with or from COVID, and of those, only 83 were with, the rest were from. So the vast majority are from.
[Malcolm] The cause of death was COVID, okay. So if we turn over to page two, at the top of page two, you have chronic cardiac symptoms with the most common preexisting chronic condition for those who had COVID-19, certified as the underlying cause of death. That goes back to the previous page, the second bullet point, the majority of deaths had an underlying cause. So where would that fit in, the 83?
[Dr. Gruen] No, no. So there were a substantial proportion of the people who died from COVID had preexisting conditions, right? But the preexisting condition didn’t kill them, but the COVID was the underlying cause of death. But the fact that they had a preexisting condition, was material.
[Malcolm] So is there any percentage of those who died with or from, who had chronic cardiac conditions?
[Dr. Gruen] Yes. It’s a good publication, Senator. It’s worth reading.
[Malcolm] I haven’t read it all.
[Dr. Gruen] No, that’s okay. Associated causes conditions in the a causal sequence, page eight. That will tell you about all the… Hang on, preexisting conditions, sorry. Preexisting conditions, page nine. And there’s a chart on page 10, which shows you what the conditions were and the proportions.
[Malcolm] So that’s percentages, are they?
[Dr. Gruen] Yes.
[Malcolm] Okay, so these are percent of the 83?
[Dr. Gruen] No, percent of the 2000. We’re talking about people who have… Yes, that’s it. Preexisting conditions were reported on death certificates for nearly 70% of the 2,556 deaths due to COVID. That’s a sentence at the bottom of page nine. And then the conditions, that chart-
[Malcolm] On the graph.
[Dr. Gruen] The chart shows you the proportion of chronic conditions that were reported on the death certificate. And you can have more than one, cheerfully.
[Malcolm] Cheerfully, right. Okay, so turning now to birth data…
[Dr. Gruen] That’s not gonna help.
[Malcolm] The Australian Bureau of Statistics releases birth data at the end of the year following. This data could influence the debate around the effect of vaccines on reproduction and may provide reassurance to vaccine customers. Why does it take so long to report on a simple metric like births? I understand the delay in the deaths for the getting the accurate annual figure, but why does it take so long for births?
[Dr. Gruen] Yeah, so I don’t know the answer to that question.
[Malcolm] I will take that on notice, Senator.
[Dr. Gruen] Yeah, we can certainly take that on notice.
[Malcolm] So the Australian Bureau of Statistics budget has grown 18% in the last year from 497 million in 2019/20 to 588 million in 2021. Is that enough to get your data out in a timely fashion?
[Dr. Gruen] So as you would be aware, the bureau publishes data across a very wide range of topics, economic, social, environmental, demographic. And so, obviously timeliness is one of the things that we care about, and in answer to Senator Walsh’s questions, I was talking about some of the new products that we have produced that have been much more timely to help decision makers in the pandemic, but there’s no question, there’s a limit. And the other thing that we care critically about is accuracy and making sure that what we produce is correct. So some of these things do take a substantial amount of time, that we are cognisant of that, and we do our best to publish them as quickly as we can, and it ultimately is a function of the resources available to us.
[Malcolm] Last question. What you’re saying, and I would agree if this is the case, is that it is better to have accurate data a little delayed, than timely data that’s not accurate.
[Dr. Gruen] It depends on the circumstances. In a situation where a pandemic has just broken out, we made the judgement that we were happy to produce data that was somewhat less accurate, fast. So there are circumstances where you are willing to accept that trade off.
[Malcolm] Is there any way we can get that
