The Australian Bureau of Statistics will examine the impact of Covid-19 and social distancing measures on the overall death rate, amid suggestions fewer people than normal may have died during the lockdown period.
While Australia has seen 97 deaths related to Covid-19, doctors and nurses are reporting that emergency departments have been quieter overall, with people spending longer indoors, causing reductions in sport and work-related injuries.
Royal Melbourne hospital confirmed its emergency department was seeing about 80% of the presentations it would usually, but this fell to 60% earlier in the pandemic. Mental health and drug and alcohol presentations are back up close to normal.
An ABS spokesman said the organisation did not yet have published information on 2020 deaths, “but we are working on methods to monitor changes in mortality patterns due to the disease and due to social changes such as people staying indoors. This is something we would expect the ABS data to be able to show us.”
The president of the Australian Funeral Directors Association, Andrew Pinder, told Guardian Australia that “anecdotally, it appears the death rate may have slowed or at least plateaued”.
“Some funeral homes have stood down staff or reduced their hours during the Covid-19 period,” he said.
Possible reasons for a slowdown in deaths not caused by Covid-19 include a reduction in road fatalities due to the lockdown provisions and a substantial drop in the number of flu cases.
New South Wales recorded a small drop in road deaths in March and April compared with previous years, and Victoria has recorded 20% fewer deaths in 2020 than in the same period of 2019, but it remains too early to say if those figures will illustrate anything relevant to the coronavirus restrictions.
Associate Professor Paul Preisz, an emergency medicine specialist at St Vincent’s hospital in Sydney, said patient numbers “aren’t what they were”. But he said he was worried a reduction in presentations now might lead to an increase in sicker patients with more complications, and possibly deaths, down the track. He said it was hard to say definitively what was causing patient numbers to slow, but it was unlikely it was just because people were staying safer and experiencing less injury and illness.
“I’m worried people are afraid to come to hospital for care for other conditions not related to Covid-19,” he said. “Maybe they are worried about going outside and getting infected, or maybe they are worried about taking up healthcare worker time in a pandemic. It’s also worrying if people are staying home with heart and kidney trouble, for example, when they should be coming in. It’s true we have been quieter than usual but it’s hard to say it’s all due to one particular thing.”
The Australasian College for Emergency Medicine has urged people not to let concerns over Covid-19 stop them seeking treatment for acute and urgent medical issues such as heart attacks, asthma or abdominal conditions such as appendicitis.
“Patients risk making their situations much worse. In extreme cases this can be life-threatening, something we have learned from other countries such as the UK,” the college president, Dr John Bonning, said.
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