Who COVIDed the Worst in 2023?

Provincial Breakdown

Thought I’d take some time and bust into the COVID Mortalities for Canada, 2023 and found some interesting things along the way.

With all of the talk and goings on in the Provinces with failing healthcare systems, hospitals being over-run, people not being able to find a doctor…and, while there are no simply solutions to improvements on the state of socialized healthcare in Canada, I used the COVID static metric to see just who is doing the best and the worst by way of not killing people who have tested positive for COVID.

2023 at least trended down for COVID Mortality, but this comes after 3 years of consecutive higher numbers, 2022 being the absolute worst, showing the greatest amount of COVID deaths, over 2020 and 2021. And when you think that each year, by trial and error alone and with each subsequent strain of COVID being less virulent, the trending on this by doing absolutely nothing should have showed a decline into 2022.

Nope.

It actually took until 2023 to see a noticeable decline in COVID associated deaths, where sum total of deaths in 2023 is 7,554 making up just over 13% of the total current mortality, to date.

To have a look at the breakdown, I omitted the territories, reason being…

Of the 57,516 deaths, there are a sum total of 61 inside of all of the territories, making up .11% of the totals…

And, like previous breakdowns, I’ve lumped all of the Maritime Provinces together due to again, low summary totals, where combined they make up less than 3% of totals…that being said, I think it’s still important to note that Prince Edward Island never had a single COVID death until 2022, and progressively gets worse but still only making up 114 deaths.

To see what the actual cut looks like for the provinces, by total mortality in 2023 only, we’d look at the following:

And from this, what seemingly stands out here is that Quebec made up 30.1% of the total COVID Mortalities for the country. Overall, in Quebec, they’ve done a completely terrible job throughout COVID, starting in 2020 when they elected to give patience with Flu Like Symptoms, End of Life Drugs and called them COVID Deaths when they died without proper treatments.

Between Medical Homicide and abandoning seniors in Long Term Care communities, Quebec shows the absolute HIGHEST death rates during the pandemic, making up 34% of the total COVID deaths for Canada, which actually brought with them making up the Highest percentage of deaths in the country for 2023.

I don’t know about you…but retiring in Quebec to me seems like a really bad idea - from a medical standpoint.

Between Saskatchewan and Manitoba, they make up only 5.6% of the deaths, which is slightly better than the sum of all of the Maritime Provinces who make up 6.6%.

Alberta seen 815 Deaths, or just below HALF of the amount of COVID deaths in British Columbia’s, 1,642 and Ontario coming in at 1,906.

The AB to BC Ratio is odd. Given that they are sister provinces and populations being within a difference of a few hundred thousand…why would there be double the mortality in BC?

It’s a good question…but another official answer that we will most likely never get.

Moving right along…

Respiratory viruses pass greater in dense populations than where people are isolated and rarely come into contact with large groups, and if all health care systems and populations were equal by way of age stratification percentages, we would expect to see the lowest populations with the lowest death rates and Ontario, being the largest province by way of population having the absolute most.

We don’t have this.

Healthcare is a mixed bag…populations move to communities that are more in keeping with their age demographics and family needs and affordability comes into play.

Without full appreciation of every variance to all of the previously mentioned, to gauge how 2023 played out, about the best I could do at a quick glance was a Population Weight Mortality Scale and it’s in this, I think you may be a little shocked.

Ontario, by way of volume weight COVID Mortalities, highest population for a province in Canada…actually came out the best…and while there was a minor improvement on not killing people in Quebec, they come out as second last place to British Columbia.

There may be a number of factors as to why BC looks this bad, and we can all speculate…but just going off of the raw statistics, highest COVID associated mortalities weighted by population, BC COVIDed the worst in 2023.

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