Covid-19 led to more than 2,000 excess deaths in Ireland in 15 weeks

There were more than 2,000 excess deaths during the worst periods combined of Covid-19 in the Republic.

The spring and early summer of 2020 and the winter of 2021, 15 weeks in total, accounted for an estimated 2,019 excess deaths, according to the Health Information and Quality Assurance (Hiqa).

Excess deaths is the difference between the number of recorded deaths from all causes and the number expected based on past trends.

Hiqa’s evaluation of Ireland’s response to Covid-19 found there were no excess deaths outside those two periods.

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Between mid- and late-2021, the excess mortality in Ireland was observed to be amongst the lowest in Europe.

Ireland experienced two peaks in the rate of new ICU admissions of patients with Covid-19 during April 2020 and January 2021, and two notable peaks in the total

Hiqa measured Ireland’s performance against the EU-27 up to the end of November last year by which time there were 5,514 Covid-19 deaths in the State.

It found that recorded Covid-19 deaths per million of the population in Ireland “remained consistently below the EU-27 average throughout the pandemic”.

More than 82 per cent of those who died in the Republic as a result of Covid-19 were over the age of 65.

Ireland's relatively young demographic compared to the rest of Europe may have been a factor in the State's relatively low death rate, according to Hiqa chief scientist Dr Conor Teljeur.

Just 13.9 per cent of the Irish population is over the age of 65 and 8.7 per cent over the age of 70. The EU average is 18.7 per cent and 12.4 per cent respectively.

Hiqa found that Ireland had some of the most stringent restrictions in Europe for much of the pandemic.

Its analysis showed that, between March 2020 and November 2021, Ireland experienced five peaks in the incidence of Covid-19.

By the end of November 2021, 570,115 cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in Ireland. Cumulative case rates for Ireland were in line with the EU-27 average until the end of November 2020, but subsequently grew at a slower rate until the end of October 2021.

The Hiqa study does not take into account the huge rise in cases which occurred in December up to now. There are now 1,484,321 confirmed PCR cases of Covid-19 and tens of thousands more that were confirmed with an antigen test.

The number of deaths as of Thursday stands at 6,843.