"Killer on the road" in New Brunswick: killing mainly under 44. CBC started talking about it. StatsCan removed data. But we still have it and can show it to you - what exactly they removed.

Special "Flash News" Announcement for the May 20, 2022 Open Canada Data Seminar .

Updates (21-25 May 2022):

• The transcript and video recording of this seminar are now available here: "Mysterious spike" in excess deaths in New Brunswick: Now you see it. Now you don't

• The preceding discussion is posted here: “Weekly update (2022-05-18): rPFVACD continues to grow but faster, reaching 33.9% from 31.2% last week. New column added for 4 doses. Steady 7 Millions of not-"fully-vaccinated"

• The follow-up discussion is posted here: Weekly update (2022-05-25): rPFVACD further up to 31.6%. Protecting Children in Ontario - Questions to ask your Provincial Elections 2022 Candidates

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News Flash (19 May 2022) for the upcoming Seminar:

As I was preparing for seminar tomorrow, I decided to go again to the StatCan website “Provisional weekly death counts, by age group, Table: 13-10-0768-01” in order to update my graphs on excess deaths in Canada after vaccination, which I have discussed with you last month (e.g. here, and here), shown below and now published in www.ivim.ca. They show deaths data that was released by StatCan on 14 April 2022. So - in the light from the latest CBC story (pasted in Appendix) about "mysterious spike in excess deaths"that New Brunswick - I just wanted to update these graphs using the new data that was released last week (Release date: 2022-05-12).

And this is what I found… (Try it yourself - Find the differences between top and bottom images. Hint: look as the highest peaks for Age group 0 to 44)

All ages:

0 to 44 years:

Did you see it? Ouch… -

They have removed exactly this "mysterious spike” in "excess deaths"that New Brunswick Minister was commenting on in the CBC article, vast majority of which - as our data has shown - happened in Age group 0 to 44 years. (See below zoomed portion of the image)

I was so astounded to see this that I decided to reexamine my code (shown in Appendix below) and just run a line code to find out when they stopped reporting values for each age group in NB.

This is what I saw:

For age group “ 0 to 44 years” Statcan replaced all values that were published last month with NA (data Not Available) starting from 2021-06-05:

dt [!is.na(value) & GEO=="New Brunswick", max(Date), by=Age]    #                  Age Date
# 1:          all ages 2021-11-27 
# 2:     0 to 44 years 2021-06-05 ***
# 3:    45 to 64 years 2021-11-20
# 4:    65 to 84 years 2021-11-27
# 5: 85 years and over 2021-11-27 

I’m speechless… But I will be able to talk about that tomorrow - at our Seminar at noon. See you then!

PS (Updated 20 May 2022)

1. Actually, I was not as much surprised, because I have already observed how other official sources used the embedded bias to skew the published results.

2. And I was not too worried that this data could be actually erased, for a number of reasons:
   - They removed data for 0-44, but they did not for All ages :) . So you can just substruct data for al other ages from All Ages to recover data for 0-44
   - We have also Death Tracker App (at www.ivim.ca/app), which uses both Live data and Cached data. - See video on how to use this app.
   - Just in case, we have also downloaded past datasets releases from web.archives.org and saved them at https://github.com/IVI-M/std-data/tree/main/ca/statcan-deaths-by-age

3. And, even if these Canada data do miraculously disappear, similar data - showing that more young people are dying AFTER vaccination than BEFORE vaccination - are now published in other countries. For example, here is data from US - from Society of Actuaries (SOA) Group Life COVID-19 Mortality Survey Report (page 23) .

• There’s also a dashboard from US CDC:

  https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#dashboard

• Here’s similar data from UK:
  https://github.com/IVI-M/std-data/tree/main/uk
  

Appendices

CBC article: Mysterious spike in N.B. deaths in 2021 not due to COVID, health minister says

URL: https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6451680

Posted: May 13, 2022
Last Updated: May 13, 2022

New Brunswick Health Minister Dorothy Shephard told MLAs Wednesday she does not know why deaths spiked in the province last summer, but doubted they were undetected COVID fatalities. (Shane Magee/CBC)

“A mysterious spike in "excess" deaths in New Brunswick that began last summer as the COVID-19 Delta variant began spreading in the province saw 636 more deaths than normal over a 20-week period, according to new estimates.  

That is an apparent mismatch with the 79 COVID deaths New Brunswick reported during the 20 weeks.

On Wednesday, Health Minister Dorothy Shephard told the legislature she does not know why deaths jumped so high, but said she doubts it was caused by undetected COVID cases.”

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The R code

 # Read, analyze and plot https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1310076801

dt <- cansim::get_cansim("13-10-0768-01") %>%  setDT() 
dt [, max(Date, na.rm = T), by=GEO] #2022-03-05

dt [!is.na(value), max(Date, na.rm = T), by=GEO] 
  #     GEO                      Date
  # 1:                    Canada 2022-01-01
  # 2: Newfoundland and Labrador 2022-03-05
  # 3:      Prince Edward Island 2021-12-11
  # 4:               Nova Scotia 2021-10-23
  # 5:             New Brunswick 2021-11-27 ***
  # 6:                    Quebec 2022-01-22
  # 7:                   Ontario 2021-12-18
  # 8:                  Manitoba  2021-03-27
  # 9:              Saskatchewan  2022-02-12
  # 10:                   Alberta 2022-03-05
  # 11:          British Columbia 2022-03-05
  # 12:                     Yukon 2016-12-31
  # 13:     Northwest Territories 2022-03-05
  # 14:                   Nunavut 2022-01-15  

  dt [!is.na(value) & GEO=="New Brunswick", max(Date, na.rm = T), by=Age]  
  # Age         Date
  # 1:          all ages    2021-11-27
  # 2:     0 to 44 years    2021-06-05 ***
  # 3:    45 to 64 years    2021-11-20
  # 4:    65 to 84 years    2021-11-27
  # 5:    85 years and over 2021-11-27 

dtHistorical <- dt [Date >= ymd("2018-01-01") & Date <= ymd("2019-12-31") ][ , week:=week(Date)  ][ ,.(ave=as.integer(mean(value, na.rm=T))), by=.(GEO, Age, week) ]

  dtPandemic <- dt [Date >= ymd("2020-01-01") ][, week:=week(Date)] dt [!is.na(value), max(Date, na.rm = T), by=GEO]  

dtExcess <- dtHistorical[dtPandemic, on=c( "GEO" ,  "Age", "week" ) ]

 convolution_window <- 8  # average of 8 weeks to easier comparison

  dt.g <- dtExcess [GEO != "Yukon"
  ][, GEO:=ifelse(GEO %in% c("Nunavut", "Northwest Territories"), "Nunavut and NWT", GEO) 
  ][, .(value=sum(value, na.rm=T), ave=sum(ave, na.rm=T)), by = .(Date, GEO, Age)
    ][, ':=' (value = frollmean(value, convolution_window, align = "right", fill = NA),ave = frollmean(ave, convolution_window, align = "right", fill = NA)), by = .(GEO, Age)
  ][ Date > ymd("2020-01-02") ]

str_age = "0 to 44 years"

g <-  dt.g [ Age == str_age] %>% 
      ggplot() +  
      geom_vline(xintercept = ymd("2021-01-01"), linetype=1, alpha=0.4) +
      geom_vline(xintercept = ymd("2021-05-01"), linetype=1, size=2, alpha=0.4) +
      geom_line(aes(Date, value),  col = "red", linetype=1) +
      geom_line(aes(Date, ave),  col = "blue", linetype=1) +
      facet_wrap(GEO ~ ., scales = "free") +
      labs( title = paste0("Mortality rate in Canada since the start of pandemic and vaccination. Release date: 2022-05-12 (Compare to Release date: 2022-04-12 )"),            subtitle=paste0("Age group: ", str_age), 
            x = "Blue line: pre-pandemic 2018-2019 average",
            y="Deaths per week", # 13-10-0768-01 (age); 13-10-0810-01 (cause)
            caption = paste0("Source: Statistics Canada - Table 13-10-0768-01 (Release date: 2022-05-12)\n Generated by Open Canada Deaths Tracker App (ivim.ca/app)"     ) )