Hundreds of coronavirus deaths in Australia's first wave of the pandemic may have been attributed to strokes, diabetes, pneumonia, flu and dementia due to limited testing | Dana_Adele
The figures have fuelled speculation coronavirus may have been circulating in the community in higher numbers than first thought.Kate Geraghty
The institute's COVID-19 working group, an army of 80 volunteer boffins that produces reports on the pandemic's effect on industries such as health and life insurance, analysed Australian Bureau of Statistics data and found the higher than expected number of deaths was "not explained by official COVID-19 deaths".Jennifer Lang, convener of the working group, said it was "statistically plausible" that the true figure was two to three times higher.
"While we cannot be definitive, we expect that more people probably died because of COVID-19 during the first wave of cases than was reported at the time," the report said. "This is likely to be because those people were not tested for COVID-19 so the cause of their illnesses was not known at the time.
"Some of these extra deaths were probably reported as pneumonia, diabetes and possibly stroke, as deaths from these causes were higher than expected during that period and all of these causes of death are related to COVID-19 in some way.""We wonder whether some of these are also undetected COVID-19 deaths," the report said.
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